Aaron Rai wasn\u2019t snubbed from the recent European Ryder Cup scouting trip to Adare Manor. The PGA-winning Englishman rather had a good excuse to miss.<\/p>\n
Rai declined his invitation because he had a close friend\u2019s wedding to attend Sunday in Portugal that he committed to a few months back.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been in the States for the last three weeks \u2026 so I felt the travel from America to Portugal, then Portugal to Ireland, then Ireland to here would have just felt like a lot,\u201d Rai explained. \u201cThis is a really big event, and it means a lot to me. So, I felt like I wanted to kind of prepare for this, especially on the back end of that busyness. It would have just felt like a lot really.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sixteen prospective team members attended the de-facto training session in Ireland, which followed last week\u2019s Irish Open in nearby Doonbeg and featured a Sunday night dinner and 18 holes of golf on Monday. In attendance were 10 players from last year\u2019s winning squad at Bethpage: Jon Rahm, Viktor Hovland, Tommy Fleetwood, Matt Fitzpatrick, Ludvig Aberg, Shane Lowry, Justin Rose, Tyrrell Hatton, Robert MacIntyre and Sepp Straka.<\/p>\n
Joining them were past Ryder Cuppers Alex Noren and Nicolai Hojgaard, plus four potential rookies: Alex Fitzpatrick, Kristoffer Reitan, Eugenio Chacarra and Angel Ayora.<\/p>\n
Rory McIlroy and Ramus Hojgaard were the two 2025 Ryder Cuppers who did not participate.<\/p>\n
Rahm called Adare \u201cimmaculate\u201d and the one-day event \u201cvery enjoyable.\u201d He was grouped with Hatton, Hojgaard and Chacarra.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think those days are great for all of us to see each other and just in a way remember why we do what we do,\u201d Rahm said. \u201cBut for people that have never been involved in anything Ryder Cup related, I think it\u2019s great to get a little bit of an example of what things may look like and what things may be like.\u201d<\/p>\n
Added Fleetwood, who played with Rose, Lowry and Ayora: \u201cSeeing there\u2019s so much that\u2019s going to happen between now and then, but getting a glimpse, a taste of it, was really cool.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fitzpatrick teamed with his little brother to beat Straka and MacIntyre. Hovland, Reitan, Aberg and Noren comprised an All-Scandinavia grouping.<\/p>\n
Lowry said he didn\u2019t arrive at Adare until 1 a.m. following his victory at the Irish Open.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was very tired on the course, and we had a good time,\u201d Lowry. \u201cIt was a worthwhile trip for the team, and I\u2019m sure Luke [Donald] and Dodo [Molinari] got some good stuff out of it. I got to go home and see my parents and everyone in Offaly on Monday evening, so that was nice. I\u2019ve had a nice few days. It\u2019s been great. Place been plenty of Mondays this year where I\u2019ve been not in the best of form, so it\u2019s nice to kind of be around to people you\u2019re closest to and yeah try and enjoy it as much as you can.\u201d<\/p>\n
McIlroy didn\u2019t provide his reason for skipping, but he did predict lots of continuity from the last two Ryder Cups.<\/p>\n
\u201cLook, inevitably there might be some new faces on that team, but I don\u2019t think there\u2019s certainly not going to be wholesale changes,\u201d McIlroy said. \u201cI think the nucleus of our team will remain the nucleus. You might have a couple maybe, but I\u2019d say for the most part, as long as everyone plays well and stays injury-free, you\u2019re going to have a very similar looking team to what we\u2019ve had the last couple times.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aaron Rai wasn\u2019t snubbed from the recent European Ryder Cup scouting trip to Adare Manor. The PGA-winning Englishman…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":772980,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[5904,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-772979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=772979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772979\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/772980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=772979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=772979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=772979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}