MARTIN LING: A lesson in remaining cool under pressure

YEP, Sunday night turned into Monday morning, and I'm sure a lot of us were glued to the old box right to the very end of the Ryder Cup.

It was hard to look away, wasn't it?

The thing that kept coming to my mind over the last hour was the incredible pressure that all the players were under.

I've played a bit of golf over the years, just for fun with two or three mates most of the time, and those of us in that bracket know how the game changes during the course of a round.

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The difference between the first 15 or 16 holes and then being one up walking down the last can be scary.

The old swing suddenly jerks or speeds up. A four-foot putt grows into an eight-footer in front of your eyes.

And that's just with a fiver or a drink in the bar at stake.

But if you multiply that pressure by about a million per cent, you might get close to what those pros have to handle.

Yes, I know people say that it's their job, they're used to it and they're paid millions of pounds for doing it.

And I know that, in football, if I was taking a penalty, because I've been practising them all my life, I'd expect to put it away.

But nobody watching the Ryder Cup last weekend could tell me that those players weren't feeling the pressure. And some.

Even Tiger Woods seemed to wilt. And if it can happen to one of the best players of all time, then you know the others must be fighting it.

How you keep your putting stroke going, when you know the whole damn thing could be won or lost on that single shot, I have no idea.

And Martin Kaymer and Francesco Molinari must have known all along that, if Europe was going to win, it would almost certainly come down to them.

That is one long slow 'drip-drip' of pressure!

I don't know about you, but in the end I thought it got to the Americans, in front of their own crowd, even more than 'our side'.

But what a fantastic contest. And I've been trying to catch up on my sleep ever since!