Europe star Shane Lowry hopped off a plane and straight onto an Instagram Live Ryder Cup debrief with Paddy Power this morning. The Co. Offaly warrior took time out of his hectic schedule to give our captain the inside track at Whistling Straits from the American players p*****g him off to on-course mind games.
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Speaking in between practice rounds at St Andrews ahead of the Alfred Dunhill Links this weekend, Shane delivered a typically honest breakdown of all the off-camera antics that went on and his desire to get revenge in Rome in 2023
Cantaly didn’t look much craic, he annoyed you at one stage. It must have annoyed you that you couldn’t beat him?
It was one of those where I was trying too hard to beat him, maybe. Yeah, he p****d me off a little bit on the 8th to be honest. I was lining up my putt and he was riling up the crowd which I didn’t think was great.
We’ll hopefully win in Rome and win in a different style.
That’s kind of the way I’m looking at it. They used the crowd to their advantage last week and obviously it worked for them.
What I will say is, it was hard to play golf in that atmosphere. I was talking about it to some other people and if we were doing something good you didn’t know about it, you didn’t hear about it. Obviously, you’d see it on the scoreboard but the very minute they did something good you’d hear the roar.
The matches were so tight together, within four holes of each other, you’d hear it and you were like, ‘Oh no, that’s another hole lost.’
DeChambeau measured Hovland’s not-gimmie, Brooks was arguing with officials, it didn’t look great but was it just mind games?
Byrson was trying to get in Viktor [Hovland]’s head, for sure. For a start, DeChambeau’s putter is about four-feet long so it’s definitely not a gimmie. I saw Justin Thomas did the same thing and I did it actually in the afternoon just because Justin Thomas did it.
They made me putt a putt from like 18 inches on the 1st so I did the exact same thing Justin Thomas did just because I was p****d off at the picture that I’d seen of him doing it on that same morning.
It was blowing 20 mile-an-hour wind, the greens were quick and the holes were cut on slopes and the problem was every time an American put it inside six feet you were getting booed if you didn’t give it to them. Stuff like that. They obviously played up to the crowd as well.
Is there a team strategy around gimmies?
I wasn’t giving them anything last week just because I was getting booed. I was giving them nothing. I was playing with Tyrrell [Hatton] on Saturday afternoon and he wanted to give them a couple of putts and I was like, ‘No. Let’s just see them in.’
It was a bit of gamesmanship from me as well, trying to p**s them off a little bit, trying to get in their heads a little bit. But, yeah, obviously it didn’t work.
I’m disappointed with the score line because I think we deserved more than that because we were a great unit, a great team. We just didn’t perform as well as we probably should have.
WATCH: Click here for Paddy and Shane’s complete Instagram Live chat
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