American View: When Tiger Woods' nine-iron slipped from the grasp of caddie Steve Williams and sank to the bottom of the lake fronting the seventh green yesterday, Tiger should have asked the match referee for time, summoned one of his team-mates from elsewhere on the course, and ordered him to strip down and dive for the club.

It wasn't as if they were doing anything else.

Woods and a couple of others held up their end of the bargain at The K Club yesterday, but for the most part the Americans performed like a bunch of whipped dogs.

To be sure, they faced a monumental task, down 10-6 when yesterday's singles play began, but they didn't even seem prepared to make a fight of it.

"I thought we were ready," Tom Lehman glumly sighed, "I guess we weren't quite ready enough."

Whatever you might have speculated going into this Ryder Cup, who could have guessed that Lehman v Woosie would turn out to be an intellectual mismatch? Over the next few days the American captain will be facing some tough questioning over his own part in the meltdown in Kildare.

While his captain's picks, Stewart Cink and Scott Verplank, acquitted themselves well, Lehman's questionable handling of the line-ups in the first two days of team play may have abetted the European cause.

And for yesterday's singles, Lehman put his four rookies out one after the other like ducks in a row, and with the exception of JJ Henry, who halved his match - at least in part due to the generosity of Paul McGinley - they might as well have been marched off to the firing squad: Zach Johnson, Vaughn Taylor, and Brett Wetterich were dispatched respectively by Darren Clarke (3 and 2), Henrik Stenson (4 and 3), and David Howell (5 and 4).

But it had been Lehman's decision to sit down Henry on both afternoons of foursomes play, even after the Connecticut player had demonstrated himself to be the most adept of the American debutants.

And it was Lehman who sowed the seeds of discontent by pulling Verplank out of a Saturday afternoon foursomes spot he had promised him in favour of his partner.

On the other hand, however many points Lehman's bungled handling of those situations might have cost the US might have been repaid yesterday. Determined to demonstrate that their captain had erred, Verplank won his match against Padraig Harrington, and Henry halved his.

And what might have happened had Lehman opted to split up the obviously malfunctioning Phil Mickelson-Chris DiMarco partnership earlier than he did? Even as he watched the Europeans celebrate, Lehman was asked what he might have done differently.

"Second-guessing is a waste of time," said the tight-lipped US skipper. "Everything we did, we did for a reason. At the end of the day, you still have to put the ball in the hole. They did that, and we didn't."

"The Europeans seemed to feed off one another," supposed Woods, suggesting that perhaps the Americans did not.

There can be little doubt the home side were buoyed by the enthusiastic crowd, but that's not much of an excuse, either.

"It was like playing golf in the Rose Bowl," marvelled Henry. "If you can't get fired up to play in that atmosphere you'd better look for something else to do."

It was unclear that the Americans themselves understood what had happened to them yesterday. Asked about the abysmal performance afterward, David Toms replied that "every close match went their way."

What golf was Toms watching? Only three matches yesterday even GOT to the 18th. One was his, which he lost one-up to Colin Montgomerie. Another was conceded to Lee Westwood (two up) after Chris DiMarco had hit his approach shot into the water. And the third was the half offered to Henry by McGinley after a streaker had run across the green.

Come to think of it, since the fellow was already prepared for the task anyway, why didn't they send him back to look for Tiger's club?

Although he and partner Jim Furyk lost a foursomes and a fourball over the first two days, they won two games as well, and the point he won yesterday gave him three, which is more than he'd won at any previous Ryder Cup. At the conclusion of play, Woods crouched forlornly beside the 18th green as he watched his adversaries celebrate.

Stewart Cink, the other wild-card pick, was the only other American in evidence yesterday. Cink birdied four of the first five holes he played and never looked back in his match with Sergio Garcia, who was bidding to become the first European player ever to take five points out of a Ryder Cup weekend.

Cink's victory was his first of the competition, although he did contribute to three halved matches. Throw in Verplank's two points and the American wild-cards look pretty good - until you compare them to the Europeans' where Darren Clarke won all three matches in which he was involved and Lee Westwood had three wins and two halves.

Why, Americans are asking, can't WE produce golfers like that? Despite the plethora of individual talent, it was apparent that the best team, and maybe even the best golfers, won at The K Club yesterday. Despite all the lip service paid to the notion of the team concept coming in by both Lehman and his charges, all that good stuff went right out the window once the matches commenced.

Perhaps sublimating their egos to a team concept in the manner of their European counterparts is so foreign to the psyche of our lads that they'll never get it.

God knows what the next American captain (most likely Paul Azinger) is supposed to do to right this floundering ship, but the guess here is it won't be to take the boys off fishing together. Lehman already tried that. It didn't work, either.