Belfry tolls as McGinley toils for turnaround

Ryder Cup: Paul McGinley's route to the biggest week of his golfing career has been far from normal. Having played his way into the team, only for the match to be postponed for a year, he found himself thinking about the Ryder Cup for virtually every living minute of the past 12 months as his form went into free-fall.

RYDER CUP: Yesterday, just days before he finally gets to push a tee peg into the ground for his first shot in a Ryder Cup, and without the bicycle clips that Thomas Bjorn advised him to wear, McGinley discovered a couple of quite different reasons to take his mind off the whole darn thing.

One came in the early hours of the morning, when he was awakened by an earth tremor that shook much of England. "At first, when I heard a noise downstairs, I thought someone was trying to break in. The dog was going mad barking, and I went around checking everywhere. I've lived in Los Angeles and slept through earthquakes and I didn't know that was what it was until I heard the radio news at eight the next morning," said McGinley.

The other thing that took McGinley's mind off the match was that, having toiled for much of the previous few days on the practice ground, he spent six hours on Sunday watching the All-Ireland matches - minor and senior - on television and was so happy for Armagh that he dispatched a congratulatory fax to their manager, Joe Kernan, yesterday before making the journey by road up to the Belfry.

The few hours drive north from his home outside London completed McGinley's anything-but-normal journey to what he calls the third biggest sporting event on the earth, next to the World Cup and the Olympics. "It's a massive stage, and it is great to be here. The important thing now is that I have achieved getting here, that I go and play well. I want to be more than just here. I want to go and compete and be part of the game."

McGinley was a more than comfortable qualifier, in eighth place, for the team a year ago. He had missed just one cut throughout a long season and was one of the most consistent players in Europe. Things have changed in the interim, however, and he changed coaches in July in an attempt to rediscover some of the old magic, so that the Ryder Cup wouldn't just pass him by.

"I was working hard on my game, practising, and trying to get it to come around it hasn't," he said.

He went to Pete Cowan, his previous coach, and told him he needed a change. "I certainly haven't shut the door on Pete in any way. I'm very grateful for what he has given me. But I am with Bob (Torrance) now and working hard. I am aware I have been through a trough, but I feel I am going out the other side now. I feel my game is starting to come around again."

McGinley, though, has shown he can live with pressure. When he teamed up with Padraig Harrington to win the World Cup of Golf at Kiawah Island in 1997, he was the strong, guiding hand. Last year, under the most severe pressure to book his qualifying place, knowing that a wild card would go elsewhere, he held firm.

"Last year, I'm under pressure to make the team, and I am playing well. And that's a great pressure, when you're there and ready to compete and your game is there, and it is a matter of getting your mind right in focus and playing well and really feel you're under control of what you're doing. That's a great pressure, as opposed to the pressure of not being in control of what you're doing. The game becoming difficult, of not playing well. The big events, like last week, coming along one after the other and you're not there to compete. That's a negative pressure, a horrible pressure. Unfortunately, that's the nature of golf. It happens. You have peaks and troughs. It's no fun when you're not playing well. But, as I say, the last four or five weeks I've hit the ball a hell of a lot better than I have been during the summer, and I feel like I am starting to compete again."

Now he has to convince captain Sam Torrance of his reacquired confidence. He has three days of practice to do so.