Luke Donald on facing raucous Ryder Cup crowd in New York and 'difficulty' facing Keegan Bradley

Captain gets his wish with Team Cup

To be called the Team Cup on this occasion, Donald is delighted that potential Ryder Cup players will gather in Abu Dhabi in January to represent Great Britain & Ireland and Continent of Europe. “It was certainly a wish of nine,” he said of whether or not that had been a no-brainer after Bob MacIntyre, Sepp Straka and Nicolai Hojgaard all used it as a springboard to make his Rome team. “I thought the first one was a big success. I learnt some good things from it and I think it was beneficial to see some of those guys playing in that sort of team atmosphere.”

How points battle has been ‘simplified’

Donald has changed the qualification process for this match, rolling the points list into one as opposed to two for Rome but, at the same time, sticking with six captain’s picks. “We wanted to simplify it first and foremost. It was complicated having two lists, a lot of things going on,” he said. “We wanted to set up something where we felt like we were going to get the six strongest and the six picks worked really well for me last year. It gave me a good opportunity to match some people to the golf course and to some people that had already made the team also just get enough rookies enough experience in there to make sure that we had a nice, well-rounded team.”

Plans in place to handle rowdy fans

The crowd in New York is expected to be raucous, with Donald smiling as he admitted that a “a lot of thought” is going into how he can help his players handle that, though he wasn’t prepared to give too much away. “Well, I'm not going to go into too much detail,” he said. “Just thoughts about how to recreate some of that stuff. But it's more about the individuals, their kind of protocols, how they react to stuff like that. That's something that I've certainly talked about a little bit within the group, and they're sort of aware of that. I think that's a process of working on it from now until New York, not waiting for the team to be finalised.”

Past glories can inspire away win

Donald has already re-appointed both Edoardo Molinari and Thomas Bjorn as two of his vice captains while Paul McGinley, the winning captain at Gleneagles in 2014, has been appointed as strategic advisor. “There's definitely things that we put in place that will continue,” said Donald of his winning formula in Rome. “I think that worked well, helped kind of get the team and the guys together in a good place. But there's different challenges with an away Ryder Cup, and there will be different approaches for that. I like the fact that we have won away four times since '87 while the Americans haven't. I think we'll draw off some of that. But you still need a strong team and you need your players to play well no matter what.”

Challenge facing his opposite number

After his weekend win in the BMW Championship, Bradley is looking even more likely than when he was appointed in July to become the event’s first playing captain since Arnold Palmer in 1963. “Yeah, it would be very difficult,” predicted Donald of that possibility. “I think you would have to sort of give your responsibility to someone else, really. Obviously there's time for him to make some decisions and team talks in the evenings, but while he's playing on the golf course, he can't be thinking about some of that stuff. He's obviously not watching how the other guys are playing, so he's going to have to rely on someone else to give him that information and kind of make some of those decisions for him.”