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Golf Monthly

Sport

Elliott Heath

Why Zach Johnson Has The Tougher Job With Ryder Cup Picks On The Horizon

Zach Johnson Dustin Johnson Brian Harman Bryson DeChambeau Justin Thomas Wyndham Clark Brooks Koepka Cameron Young Collin Morikawa Jordan Spieth

Five golfers in a montage with Zach Johnson in the middle

Lucas Glover won his second consecutive PGA Tour title and has seemingly come from nowhere to find himself on the brink of the US Ryder Cup team.

He's given Zach Johnson a nice headache in what is set to be a very difficult two weeks of discussions for the United States captain and his vice captains.

Johnson will know his six automatic qualifiers come Sunday night and will then name his six wildcard picks in two weeks' time on Monday August 28.

Who will those be? He probably doesn't even know yet. Will he go with the form players or will he go the 'form is temporary, class if permanent' route that worked so well for Thomas Bjorn in 2018?

If he goes for that route, he'll pick Justin Thomas and Dustin Johnson. If he doesn't, which is probably the most likely scenario, his job will be slightly easier and he can cherry pick from the rankings - but there are still a good 15-or-so players in contention.

Former World No.1 and two-time Major winner Dustin Johnson went 5-0 last time out at Whistling Straits but finds himself as an outsider for a wildcard pick this year (Image credit: Getty Images)

On the opposite side of the spectrum, Luke Donald looks to have an easier task with his wildcards, where I can see just two spots up for grabs as things stand.

The first ten names on his European team have picked themselves in my mind: McIlroy, Rahm, Hovland, Fleetwood, Fitzpatrick, Hatton, Rose, Lowry, Straka and Meronk.

Who takes the final two spots? Donald will have a tough decision to make but nowhere near as difficult as Zach Johnson. Robert MacIntyre, the Hojgaard twins, Seamus Power, Alex Noren, Victor Perez and Pablo Larrazabal will be the leading names for those two picks.

Zach Johnson, on the other hand, will have two players on his team he likely wasn't even thinking about at the start of the year - Wyndham Clark and Brian Harman, who so impressively won the year's final two Majors to book their spots on the US team.

That's no bad thing as they've both proven themselves to be able to beat the best in the world in the biggest events, but it does make the final few picks trickier.

The top six currently reads Scheffler, Clark, Cantlay, Harman, Koepka and Homa.

Schauffele, Spieth and Young are the next three names - they're perhaps locked in already. Does that mean that there's three spots up for grabs? Most likely.

Could DeChambeau make it through as a wildcard after his 58? (Image credit: Getty Images)

Next in the rankings come Collin Morikawa, Keegan Bradley and Sam Burns. That's 12 names and the likes of Glover, Thomas, DeChambeau, Fowler, Finau and Gooch haven't been mentioned yet. You can make a case for all of them.

Who will Johnson go for? It's anyone's guess.