This week promises to be one of sporting success for Surrey Cricket after they won a second successive County Championship title.
The county also has had an unlikely hand in how the Ryder Cup might play out for the next three days. Dave Sampson was a data analyst for Surrey while he studied golf architecture and is now very much at the forefront of golf course design.
When Marco Simone Golf and Country Club, created in 1991, won the right to host this year’s Ryder Cup, Sampson was called upon to redesign it.
A major part of his remit was to make a course that gave Europe their best possible chance of continuing their remarkable run of success on home soil, dating back three decades.
Keen on a dramatic finale, central to his thinking has been a lot of “risk-reward holes on the back nine, where the drama of the Ryder Cup really is”, providing plenty of thrills and spills for the 250,000-plus expected through the turnstiles from Friday onwards.
Habitual thinking is that narrow fairways play to the strengths of the European players, bearing in mind many of the courses of their upbringing. In contrast, Whistling Straits, where Europe succumbed to a record defeat, could barely have boasted wider fairways.
The other supposedly European advantage is the heavy rough not far off the fairway, although it will not necessarily feel an advantage to Luke Donald’s dozen players if and when any of them find themselves in it.
On the European team’s recce of Rome earlier this month, the players complained it was like trying to find a needle in a haystack when their ball was plugged in the deep rough. As a result, the course staff have been ordered to give it a bit of a trim since. Despite that, it still remains unforgiving.
Rory McIlroy talked about Marco Simone being the sort of course where a European might have begun his career, but downplayed the home advantage, with the majority of players on either team well versed in playing the same courses as each other week in, week out on the PGA Tour.
As for the American reputation for hitting the ball long, the European players average 308.5 yards off the tee this year, in comparison to their US counterparts at 305.6.
And, perhaps surprisingly, the Americans have been more accurate at finding the fairways, albeit by the barest of margins.
Another home advantage is on the greens, which are slower than the Americans are used to. With glorious weather expected all weekend, though, one suspects they will speed up.
As for the Americans, they do not seem unduly concerned by the vagaries of the hilly and energy-sapping course. Asked about the challenge of Marco Simone, Patrick Cantlay said it was “definitely the best course I’ve played in Italy”. It also transpired it was the only one.
