So smug Nick can make US cringe again on Sunday

No wonder he never had time for Faldo. He's been beaten by him at fishing and poker, he lost 6-1 in Major wins but, as an old streetfighter ready for "our biennial battle", he'll remember with a growl that Faldo never got the better of him in four head-to-head Ryder Cup clashes as players. You just know this is personal for him.

If the competition was to be decided on their pre-tournament jousts, the ref would have listened to Faldo's best pay-off line, courtesy of Ali - "We may look as if we've just floated in like a butterfly but I promise you we are here to sting like a bee" - and still raised Azinger's hand.

Fortunately the public posturing can be misleading to the point of irrelevance. Just remember how dear old Ian Woosnam seemingly bumbled along in comparison to smooth talking, super-efficient Tom Lehman before the K Club only to still oversee the most crushing European victory of all. So it is Faldo's performance behind closed doors in the team room, the success with which one of sport's great loners can protect and nurture the fabled European team spirit, which is the only thing that really counts here. And listening to what sounded genuine and occasionally star-struck testimony to his leadership from his players this week, he's evidently won them over.

McDowell - from Northern Ireland, Nick - raved about how the team sat on the edge of their seats waiting for his "nuggets of wisdom" while Oliver Wilson daydreamed about when he went to the 1993 cup at the Belfry. "He was my hero back then. I never really dreamed of playing on his team and to have him as my captain is just fantastic," he cooed.

This is Faldo's real test; using his greatness as a player to, for instance, make Wilson, the only European player never to have won a tournament, believe in himself to the point that come Sunday an unsung Mansfield lad could continue that glorious tradition of unlikely last-day legends like Phil Price and Christy O'Connor Jnr.

The odds are that Faldo will need one of these "heroes from the shadows" as Sam Torrance dubbed them. Faldo bagged a record 25 points in his career but his success or otherwise in cajoling just one solitary point from, say, Soren Hansen, a Dane so unfamiliar here that he's even had his name spelt wrong on his tournament golf bag, could end up defining his one crack at captaincy.

For while Faldo has the proven leaders, a three-match winning streak and, in a class of his own, Sergio Garcia - Did the Spaniard wake up today, bounce on his bed and cry "It's Ryder Cup time!" as Luke Donald recalls he did two years ago? - the odds are that after two European walkovers, this edition will recall that glorious period between 1987 and 2002 when matches were decided, on average, by just one-and-a-half points.

I'd back a two-point win for Europe but with plenty of reservations; like the effect of 40,000 whooping "Ooo-S-A" and the fear that the Europeans are a Monty/Clarke-free zone and have a weaker-looking tail than of late. If Azinger could somehow conjure up a weekend where, say, Phil Mickelson looks as if he actually gives a damn or Kenny Perry becomes some unstoppable juggernaut then what odds on Brookline being revisited, only hopefully minus the poison?

Last night, Azinger called this "the greatest event in the whole of sport". Maybe, but only for as long as it remains a contest not a procession. So here were two reasons why he must have felt it would be simply unthinkable for him to preside over a third consecutive US blowout here on Sunday.

One, the genuine fear that if that happened, American golf might feel it had run out of answers. And the other? Well, if he thought the Faldo show was unbearable before the tournament had even begun . . .