Euro Ryder Cup Committee Hopes A Few More Months Of Missed Cuts Will Convince Ollie to Reconsider

John Hopkins reports that the committee selecting Europe's 2010 Ryder Cup captain has postponed their decision, giving the British press until May to dig up every conceivable anonymous quote against Sandy Lyle.

Chief of these is that some of the 15-man committee want José María Olazábal, Nick Faldo’s vice-captain at Valhalla in Louisville last September, to be captain. However, Olazábal, 42, is reluctant to accept the challenge, preferring first to recover from the rheumatism and fatigue that disrupted his season in 2008 and then to assess whether he has a chance of making what would be his eighth appearance in the biennial event.

Meanwhile Lawrence Donegan considers the political situation influencing who might be selected, with this on Olazábal and Lyle.

However, if he plays well enough to be in contention for a place on the team, then the focus will shift back to Lyle, who remains the only member of European golf's "big five" from the 1990s (Seve Ballesteros, Faldo, Woosnam and Bernhard Langer being the others) who has not had the honour and the commercial windfall of the Ryder Cup captaincy. "I think it would be a terrible shame if he wasn't given the job," one well-placed member of the European Tour hierarchy said today. "With the right people around to support him he would be fine as a captain."

Boy, there's a ringing endorsement.