It was the mother of all fightbacks by the United States, one that turned Sunday in to a gut-wrenchingly nervous ordeal for Europe, but cometh the moment, cometh the Offaly man. “The Irish and the Ryder Cup, there is something about it,” said Shane Lowry after he produced the putt that ensured Europe retained the trophy. Philip Reid rounds up an extraordinary day.
Lowry halving his match with Russell Henley was, writes David Gorman in his player ratings, “the greatest Irish draw since Italia 90”, but Rory McIlroy ran out of steam in his match against Scottie Scheffler. Once again, he got dog’s abuse from the crowd, later describing the behaviour of the home crowd as unacceptable, not least when they showered his wife with beer as well as invective.
Keith Duggan has covered just about every major sporting event known to man, but never did he witness anything like the “jaw-dropping” ugliness that McIlroy and Lowry in particular were subjected to.
Denis Walsh, meanwhile, couldn’t but smile when Luke Donald had a dig at the Americans for getting appearance fees for playing in the competition, as if “money was beneath” his European team. “Sitting behind him were two players who had sold their souls to the Saudis”, Jon Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton. “In golf,” he writes, “there is no moral high ground”.
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From Shanghai to New Delhi to Kigali, there were Irish World Championship medals galore over the weekend, Fiona Murtagh and mixed double sculls pair Mags Cremen and Fintan McCarthy winning rowing gold, para athletes Orla Comerford and Greta Streimikyte collecting gongs of the same colour and Ben Healy becoming the first Irish rider to win a World Cycling Championships medal since Seán Kelly in 1989.
There were no medals, though, for Leinster on the opening weekend of the URC, their 35-0 “shellacking” by the Stormers the first time in 17 years that they failed to score a point in a league match. Munster, Ulster and Connacht had a happier time of it, though, John O’Sullivan rounding up the weekend’s action.
And Denis Walsh and Gordon Manning were at Croke Park on Sunday to see it host its first regular season NFL game, the place, writes Denis, parading itself “in drag, plastered in vampish lipstick and heavy mascara and big hair” for the occasion. To think that “it is only a matter of weeks since GAA followers got a fit of vapours over the grass being mown in tartan patterns for the All-Ireland finals”.
TV Watch: It’s a quiet enough sporting day/night on the box, but if you want to spend the bulk of it revisiting the 2025 Ryder Cup, Sky Sports Golf has you sorted. And at 8pm, Everton and West Ham kick off in their Premier League meeting (Sky).
