Rory McIlroy and Shane Lowry will both be in action in side-by-side matches in the opening session of foursomes of the Ryder Cup on Friday morning with McIlroy paired with Tommy Fleetwood and Lowry alongside the Austrian Sepp Straka.
Fleetwood and McIlroy (certain to be shortened to Fleetwood Mc by the end of the week) are up against the ace American pairing of Xander Schauffele and Patrick Cantlay who have won four out of five matches together in Ryder Cup and President's Cup play over the last two years.
That will be the anchor match on the course in the morning.
Just ahead of them in the third match out will be Lowry and Straka against Ricky Fowler and Collin Morikawa.
The Ireland-Austria pairing have been together in practice over 27 holes over the three preparation days here and they played two rounds together at Wentworth in the BMW PGA Championship just two weeks ago.
They also play the same golf ball, the Srixon Z Star XV, which is a convenient coincidence in the technical equipment suitability of a foursome pairing where the nuances of spin rate and feel around the greens can be a significant factor.
Neither pairing is a surprise as Lowry and Straka share a very steady set of ball striking statistics while McIlroy and Fleetwood look to be a strong apparent fit with their premium tee-to-green games.
Europe will be led out in match one by John Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton against Scottie Scheffler and Sam Burns at 6.35am (Irish Time).
Following them at a 15 minute interval will be Viktor Hovland and rookie Ludvig Aberg against Max Homa and Brian Harman.
So after a week of carefully worded player and captains' press conferences, actual golf shots will be fired in the morning to the relief and pent-up anticipation of just about every true golf fan, LIV 'bots’ excepted.
The Ryder Cup, with a near century-long history, is an event which has beaten a path beyond the boundaries of the game and becomes transcendent to the point of attracting attention from outside the traditional perimeters of golf like no other event.
But there is a sense here that this particular Ryder Cup might need to find something that has diminished in recent matches because there hasn’t been an exciting contest since the famous European comeback in 2012 at Medinah near Chicago.
That match signalled, as much as a similar American comeback in 1999, the facility of the Ryder Cup format to produce drama which would barely be credible if it had been crafted in fiction.
The 2012 match was also an outlier as being the only occasion in the last eight matches when the away side were triumphant.
Too many of the contests from the 2006 staging at the K Club in County Kildare have been home team blow-outs and since 2012, the average winning margin has been a one-sided seven points.
No matches have been more skewed than the last one in 2021 in Wisconsin where a clearly superior American team bulldozed their way to a 19-9 record margin of victory.
Two years on though, these opposing teams look a lot more even with Europe possessing three of the world’s top four players in their roster as well as owning home venue which has the added element of allowing the host country to set up the course to their advantage .
However, to counter that, the USA can find all twelve players on their team inside the Top 25 in the world rankings against seven in the same territory for Europe.
So in evaluating all those elements, a case can be made that the result could go down to the last few singles on the course on Sunday but McIlroy, playing in his seventh Ryder Cup, does not believe that the matches need necessarily be close to be exciting.
"Whether it’s a 14.5-13.5 scoreline or 19-9, I think it’s exciting either way. If we go and beat the Americans like we did in Paris in 2018, I don’t think anyone is going to complain that it wasn’t competitive," he said on Wednesday.
"Having said that, it probably will be close because the teams are so evenly matched."
For Europe to counter the depth of the American team, much has been made of their likely reliance on those three players in the world's top four. While Jon Rahm (World No 3) had a positive experience by winning three of his five matches in the heavy defeat in Wisconsin, McIlroy (World No 2) had a poor campaign winning one point from four while Hovland (World No 4) took just one from five.
But both are now playing some of their best golf right now and the Norwegian has been particularly hot of late winning the BMW Championship last month in Chicago and finishing joint lowest 72 hole scorer in the Tour Championship in Atlanta.
His short game coach Joe Mayo has been following Hovland through every practice round here in Rome after helping transform a clear weakness in his game into an apparent strength.
It all has the appearance of being the final piece in the jigsaw.
Rahm’s hot run of six victories from October 2022 to the Masters last April cooled off somewhat in early summer but his joint runner-up finish in the Open last July and fourth placing in Wentworth two weeks ago is evidence that he is ready to resume the kind of lead-out role that he tried so valiantly to play in an otherwise dull European performance in 2021.
Assuming Rahm and Hovland perform and hold their end up, the key for Europe could well be McIlroy who, in the absence of Garcia, Westwood and Poulter, is now the senior figure in the team.
For a player of his substance, a four-time major winner and three-time FedEx Cup champion, he has only a 50% points record in Ryder Cup competition.
He accepts he’s a leader and it’s a role his captain wants him to assume by example rather than words: "As Luke said, I can lead with my clubs making birdies and getting blue on the board."
And he added at his press conference: "I love being part of this team. Some of my most enjoyable experiences in my career have been being part of European Ryder Cup teams. Nothing beats this week."
Shane Lowry revealed on Tuesday that his concentration on making the European team had dominated much of his year: "I’ve put a lot of my eggs in one basket with the Ryder Cup this year. I focused on it a lot, maybe too much at times, but I’m hoping that when it comes to Sunday evening I’ll be on the winning side. I believe I will be."
Both Lowry and McIlroy have openly expressed their desire to play alongside each other this week and both are determined to fare better than they did in their heavy fourball defeat to Tony Finau and Harris English at Whistling Straits two years ago.
While Europe undoubtedly look stronger than in 2021 and have not been beaten at home since 1993, there is a spine of sheer player-power strength about the Americans who also discovered in their Wisconsin victory that they can perform as a cohesive team rather simply a bunch of individuals who come together for a week.
With six of the World’s top ten among their 12 including three of this year’s major champions in Brooks Koepka (USPGA), Wyndham Clark (US Open) and Brian Harman (Open) along with two strong established successful pairings in Justin Thomas/Jordan Spieth and Cantlay/Schauffele, they are probably the strongest team in depth to represent the USA away from home since that 1993 victory at the Belfry.
But Ryder Cups are about so much more than just statistics and playing records.
As one of Luke Donald’s assistant captains Nicolas Colsaerts said in Medinah in 2012 after plundering nine birdies and an eagle in partnering Lee Westwood to a one-hole victory over Tiger Woods and Steve Stricker: "You’ve just got to go with what you have in your pants."
