Plans by the Royal and Ancient to bring the British Open back to Carnoustie, indicate a confidence that their championship is bigger than the concerted sniping of some disenchanted Americans. "There is no question in my mind that it will come back here," said Hugh Campbell, chairman of the R and A championship committee, yesterday.

He went on: "The Opens are planned through to 2002 and there is an unofficial sequence we follow. Carnoustie will now come back into that calculation and I think it will stage the event again towards the end of the next decade."

Which means that while officials were prepared to accept criticism of the way the links was presented, they utterly rejected condemnation of it as an inappropriate venue for the game's most coveted prize.

The return of this year's championship to the Angus links, for the first time in 24 years, brought stinging criticism about the way it was set up, from such luminaries as Tom Watson and US Open champion Payne Stewart.

As it happens, Lawrie's winning score of 290, six over par, was the highest since Henry Cotton triumphed at Muirfield with 294 in 1948. "The course remains a really difficult test of golf, but I was amazed at how defensively some of the best competitors played it," said Campbell.

In his view, the top players will have to learn more about the course and learn to attack it more, if they are to handle it successfully. "The thinking had to be done on the tee and the best players didn't work out the way to play the course," he claimed.

This view was roundly endorsed by John Philp, the links superintendent, who was recruited from St Andrews 14 years ago. "There is so much money in the game nowadays, that I think some of the players are losing touch with reality," he said.

"A lot of them made no preparation for the world's greatest event. They thought it would be just another venue to be ripped up with the winner finishing at 19 under par. The challenge here wasn't just to do with length. There were a lot of subtleties involved."

He explained: "You have to use the contours, the banks, the mounds and swales. You have to think about it. Asked to use a half-swing on a seven-iron shot and they're mesmerised. Usually they don't have to think too much about shaping their shots, but this is a different class.

"They're all geared up to hit shots precise distances, but they could tear up the yardage charts at Carnoustie. This was never meant to be target golf but they couldn't grasp that basic fact. They thought they could come here and rip the guts out of it. Who the hell do they think they are?

"One player told me this was the toughest course on the planet, but the man who got aggressive with five or six of the holes would win. Christ, they were playing for £350,000 and you should be made earn that sort of money." Though it is clear that players over-reacted to the difficulty of the set-up, it is equally clear that the fairways were too tight, given the windy conditions over the four days. Yet, while professionals protested that the driver was being taken out of their hands, what they really meant was that it was not prudent to smash the ball 280 yards with abandon.

Sir Michael Bonallack, who retires as secretary of the Royal and Ancient Club which runs the championship, added: "Tiger Woods used irons on most tees and lost his advantage."

Fiercest criticisms were for the denseness of the rough so close to the fairways, but both Bonallack and Campbell denied this was aided by the use of fertilisers. Rather was it caused naturally by an unusually wet and hot period in the six weeks leading up to the event, they claimed.

"There are two options on setting up a course," said Campbell. "One is by lengthening it and we decided that would be ridiculous with Carnoustie (at 7,361 yards it was already the longest ever used) and so we used bunkering and doglegs to narrow it." Then he added: "The one thing I would change is the landing area of the second shot at the par-five sixth," (It measured less than 12 yards across).

Campbell saw no poor reflection on the championship in the fact that Lawrie, ranked 159th in the world, took a title which was heading for world number 152 Jean Van de Velde until he triple-bogeyed the last hole in farcical circumstances.

"Paul Lawrie knew about Carnoustie and that must have been a help, while the one guy who handled the rough best was Van de Velde," said the R and A official. "Each time he went in he just knocked out sideways.

"The week was sprinkled by the kind of disaster experienced by Craig Parry at the 12th (another triple-bogey seven at a time when he was leading) and the people who worked it out were those who got into the play-off.

"This Open has been a tremendous success. We coped comfortably with 35,000 people a day and the week had triumph, tragedy, romance, anger, drama, farce, pathos and controversy. It follows the Open around. The criticisms have been a matter of opinion."

As the R and A attitude indicates, Campbell does not expect any problem in attracting every leading player back. Next year's Millennium Open is at St Andrews and conditions could hardly be more different there. "If you challenge a good player and he is not successful, then he will come back," he said. "Golf is like that."