Revealed: Luke Donald's secret box of tricks that led Europe to Ryder Cup glory - a summit in Ireland, Edoardo Molinari's data alchemy and how he hid it from the US, new bed sheets, virtual reality, $60 shampoo... and how they partied through the night

It was precisely two hours after Shane Lowry put the Ryder Cup to bed on Sunday when he appeared in the car park of Bethpage in blue pyjamas.

He was hovering around the European bus and by then, at 8.10pm locally, that was a rowdy vehicle. Jon Rahm was already onboard, Bob MacIntyre too, and a noisy combination of Sepp Straka, Justin Rose, Matt Fitzpatrick, Rasmus Hojgaard and Viktor Hovland had begun working through a variety of chants and songs.

It was difficult to tell exactly who had started the rendition of Spandau Ballet’s Gold, only that it was struck up once Luke Donald appeared at the door with the trophy.

Equally it was hard to deduce the subject of the next effort: ‘You’re getting sacked in the morning.’ Keegan Bradley perhaps? From there, irony was easier to detect in a third offering: ‘Is this a library, is this a library?’

And that one was a nod to the first-tee scenes of Friday, when the New Yorkers had not yet lived up to their reputation, before a subdued atmosphere for the 45th edition of the Cup made way for one of the most febrile, and disgraceful, it has ever known.

With appropriate timing, Rory McIlroy, the target for the worst of it, emerged and walked from the Team Europe tent to the bus, followed by Tommy Fleetwood and Tyrrell Hatton, while Lowry, in his PJs, continued to wander around, apparently lost in the haze of one of his greatest evenings. That or the ciders he had downed.

It was an hour or so later that he posted a picture on social media summing up the vibe. He was clutching that golden trophy as he slouched on a blue beanbag – the colour was no accident, because in Donald’s team these things rarely are – and above him, in large lettering on the wall was a quote Bradley supplied in a locker-room chat earlier this year: ‘We are going to go to Bethpage to kick their f***ing ass.’ No accident in the choreography of that photograph, either.

How the rest of the evening panned out will be told in countless social media videos. Paul McGinley, formerly a winning captain himself and a consultant to this great team, had actually expressed the wish to them that maybe, just maybe, they shouldn’t overindulge to the extent they forgot the brushstrokes of the day.

A suspicion persisted that those words were doomed the minute they left his mouth, but some celebrations are well-earned. Some wins are worth the hangover.

That this one was achieved 13 years after the last away victory in the Cup made it an immense feat; that they pulled it off against such weight of history was the least accidental thing of all.

It is well known by now that Donald is a man wedded to details. Obsessed by them. From exhaustive studies of statistics to virtual reality simulations of a New Yorker’s abuse, and clothing choices that echoed victories of the past, the west was won in the minutiae.

But it was on Sunday that Donald volunteered information we hadn’t already heard on that same theme. Some of it was as wild as the previous three days.

For instance, when they checked into the Garden City hotel housing the two teams on opposite wings this week, Donald wasn’t satisfied with the shampoo available at their elegant digs, so he sent out for bottles of Le Labo, which costs around $60 (£45) a go.

The bed sheets also weren’t as comfortable as he felt his players needed for adequate sleep, so he had them changed. Another tweak saw the sourcing of covers for their bedroom doors to let in less light. The shirts they wore had four stripes, for each of Europe's previous away wins.

Trivial in the recipe of a sporting result? Possibly, probably. But he saw stones and didn’t want to leave them unturned. That has been his style and it’s hard to argue against a captain who has now won home and away and is only the second European to do so, after Tony Jacklin in the 80s.

Some elements of the approach have worked better than others – the virtual reality headsets, handed out at a team dinner he convened on the Tuesday of the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth earlier this month, would be one example.

The players enjoyed the innovation and the facility to adjust the abuse settings, but noted the impossibility of recreating the madness ahead. Rose used it for five minutes and left it for his 16-year-old son and mother to conduct their own experiments. Hojgaard said ‘it was a fun little gimmick’.

There was also a certain futility in Donald’s hope, stated often in private, that his players must not rise to the baiting of a bearpit – we could see that in the frequency with which McIlroy and Lowry told fans to ‘f*** off’ when lines were crossed via the personal abuse of families.

But there were no surprises whatsoever when it became fiercely unpleasant, and that was a key aim of Donald’s preparation.

For two years, he had drummed across that same message, which MacIntyre told me recently was based on the logic that if they travelled expecting a riot, then anything less would feel like a walk in the park. As it transpired, it was awful, especially comments directed at McIlroy and his wife on Saturday afternoon when the alcohol kicked in, but there was no performance-inhibiting sense of shock.

If anything, the Europeans upped their game the more fevered the surroundings became – look no further than McIlroy’s approach to two feet a moment after he felt compelled to tell a fan to ‘shut the f*** up’ in the Saturday foursomes.

Naturally, these details can all be overplayed. As Jacklin told me a fortnight ago: ‘If you win you’re a genius, if you lose you’re a schmuck.’

But there has been genius in Donald’s work here, and most clearly in his recruitment of the former world No 14 Edoardo Molinari, who has been Europe’s stats guru through two cycles.

Such is Molinari’s strength in that area, he runs his own analytics company and Europe’s edge has been preserved by his refusal to share the secret sauce with American golfers who have wanted to work with him. In the alchemy of picking pairings, accounting for four of the five Cup sessions, and which Europe won to the tune of 11.5 to 4.5 here, he has been invaluable in his assessments.

Breaking up the Viktor Hovland/Ludvig Aberg duo was a decision taken only after great input from Molinari and it was a risk – they had combined to make Scottie Scheffler cry after a record beating in Rome in 2023.

Putting Aberg with Fitzpatrick instead was a leap of numerical faith because the latter had a dire Cup record on arrival, but their 5&3 destruction of Scheffler and Russell Henley on Friday morning was the mood music of the opening day.

A comparison to Bradley was made easy by the latter’s blunders. None was greater than his choice to use Harris English and Collin Morikawa in the same foursomes session despite the evidence presented by Data Golf, a website used across professional golf, which suggested their skillsets made for the very worst possible collaboration of all 132 options.

They were crushed by McIlroy and Fleetwood and Bradley’s response? He sent them out again, to the same outcome on Saturday.

A senior member of Donald’s performance staff offered a smile the width of Bethpage Black when I asked him on Sunday if the European captain would have made the original error, let alone the one that compound it.

A second point: much was made in niche circles of the call on the opening session to let Henley drive on the odd-numbered holes and Scheffler the evens, despite that pitting them too often against their natural shot shapes.

What made that curious situation more interesting was the reporting from a well-connected American journalist that the golfers decided to change the order the next day with minimal outside input. The idea that Donald would have allowed a relatively significant call to be taken on the fly is utterly fanciful.

He isn’t a control freak but his diligence in becoming one of British sport’s finest leaders – and quite possibly a candidate for a knighthood down the line – is one of his sharpest traits.

That included loading his players on to a charter flight immediately after the tournament at Wentworth on Sunday, September 14 so they could practise together at Bethpage Black on the Monday and Tuesday.

By then, Donald knew the course like the back of his hand – he made three separate reconnaissance trips there in the past two years, including one in May 2024 that even preceded Bradley’s hasty, chaotic appointment once Tiger Woods rejected the role. Molinari himself made at least two trips without Donald, so they knew full well what statistical qualities to promote.

As it happened, Donald valued experience above all else, owing to the unique challenge of the New York atmosphere – 11 of his 12 players were the same from Rome – and their effort was made easier by how Bradley configured the Bethpage layout.

Tweaking the setup is meant to be one of the major advantages of being the host, but it was squandered by Bradley’s call to cut down the rough from four inches to a little more than two. The assumption was that the adjustment would embolden and favour the US’s array of bigger hitters, but it effectively created a putting contest – a European strength.

By the end, eight players from Donald’s side ranked in the top nine for strokes gained in putting across the three days. That was the key difference in performance.

Returning to more nebulous, albeit important, concepts, strong communication in Donald’s European team has been presented as unprecedented by the players, including McIlroy on Sunday.

That extended to near-weekly calls or messages from Donald across the past two years to those on his radar, feeding into the widely accepted view that the European teams tend to be closer knit than their American opposition. Where the latter have often appeared to struggle as individuals cajoled into a team, the Europeans seem to find it easier.

A Team Europe source highlighted one example of that from last month. During the Irish Open, Donald and Hatton travelled 50 miles to join Lowry for a pre-tournament meal at his restaurant, the Old Warehouse, in Tullamore.

When the Europeans describe the biennial contests as the best weeks of their careers, it is partly because of that camaraderie. The lobbying by Team USA to be paid to play has fuelled suspicions of other priorities. Donald has certainly not been shy this week in pointing out that his team play for the badge and each other.

It might just be the case that Europe are simply riding a rare generation or two of superb players – they had the Masters champion in McIlroy, the LIV champion in Rahm and the winner of the FedEx Cup in Fleetwood. The ensemble was also stacked with winners on the PGA Tour and major contenders.

Was that the main factor? Or was it just one of many details, wrapped into a winning plan by one captain and assisted in its execution by the shortcomings of another? The man in the pyjamas on the beanbag didn’t seem minded to quibble either way.