McGinley ever the team player

Golf: World Cup Paul McGinley doesn't know why the merest whiff of team competition transforms his psyche on a golf course, or why it invigorates his play. But, for some reason, it does.

At the Ryder Cup in September, the Dubliner - again - was a rock-solid contributor to Europe's cause. Yet, as if to stress golf's fickle nature, his individual performances since then - 28th, 63rd, 41st - were woefully inadequate, and almost led him to despair. Until yesterday, that is.

Thrown back into team responsibility, and responding magnificently to the call, McGinley combined with Padraig Harrington to post a fourball score of 12-under-par 60 - both of them agonisingly missed birdie putts on the last to break golf's magical barrier - to share the lead with Austria after the first round of the World Cup at a benign Real Club de Golf de Sevilla.

For McGinley, especially, the day enabled him to revive his game.

"I've been so disappointed with my form since the Ryder Cup. I just lost my form. I lost the feeling on what I was doing on my swing, and I lost my focus," he explained. "For some reason, team events bring out the best in me and I'm annoyed that I can't play like this week in and week out. I don't know why it should be. I just can't put my finger on it, but I need to get to the bottom of it."

The key, it would seem, is to play all tournaments as if they were team events. Yesterday, for certain, McGinley could do little wrong. On the couple of occasions that he did err, McGinley extricated himself spectacularly from trouble: twice he holed-out with bunker shots. The first time was at the second, where he holed from a greenside bunker for a birdie that was the catalyst for a run of four successive birdies, and he repeated the feat on the 13th, in this instance for an eagle.

McGinley and Harrington dove-tailed quite beautifully. On each tee, just as they have done since they won the World Cup at Kiawah Island in 1997, McGinley hit first.

"Paul's a good, solid hitter and hits a lot of fairways. Obviously, it's a lot easier for me when I see them down the middle," said Harrington of a strategy that worked extremely well.

Unlike many partnerships who conduct the minimum amount of talking on the golf course, the two Dubliners prefer to discuss, as McGinley put it, "all type of crap" on the way around the course. So it was that the discussion heading down the first fairway was of the previous night's soccer international between Spain and England and, in between the talks, the pair produced superb golf.

On only one occasion, where McGinley was faced with an eagle putt on the 16th after he had played a brilliant three-wood approach shot of 258 yards over water to the green, did he actually ask his partner for a read.

Ironically, he missed the putt, the ball falling away at the last moment.

Of that strategy not to seek advice too frequently, McGinley observed: "We've made the mistake before of having the two of us and the two caddies involved in reading putts and you get paralysis-by-analysis from having four different opinions. I think it's very important that even though it's a team sport that you continue playing individually, because that's what we're so used to doing week in and week out."

In the main, the strategy worked wonderfully; and the birdies came thick and fast, kick-started by the holed-out bunker shot on the second where McGinley used a sandwedge rather than a lobwedge so that the ball would run at the hole.

Harrington followed with birdies on the third and fourth. McGinley holed from five feet on the fifth.

On it went. Harrington birdied the eighth, McGinley - after Harrington's approach plunged into the lake - the ninth.

The dove-tailing continued on the back nine.

Harrington birdied the 11th, McGinley the 12th. Then came McGinley's eagle on the 13th where, this time, he used his lobwedge to hole out. "It was one of those where you just walked up to the bunker shot and knew exactly what you wanted to do," he said.

Harrington kept the momentum going by birdieing the 14th and McGinley finished their birdie blitz by tapping in on the 16th after his eagle putt shaved the hole.

Both had a birdie putt on the 18th, and both were conscious that if either one dropped that it would be for a 59.

"We would have liked to have shot 59. I know it's a fourball and everything, but it is a milestone. It's very difficult to do. I know we had opportunities, but we can't be too disappointed with 60," said Harrington of a score that was equalled by the Austrian pair of Markus Brier and Martin Wiegle.

England's Luke Donald and Paul Casey lay a shot adrift of the joint-leaders.

Today, the format switches to foursomes, and there is little danger of the Irish duo losing the run of themselves.

"Look, it's a good start," said McGinley, "but there's a lot of good teams and the course is yielding a lot of birdies. We're going to have to stay in the leading group. It's a bit like a cycle race and you want to be up there going into the last day. I don't think this is a tournament where you can break free and get away to a big lead."