Never mind the hats spat, the US players were underpaid, underdressed and nowhere near prepared for a fight over here
Beneath the sweet smell of cut grass, hot coffee and olive wood you could catch the faint trace of something fetid in the air at Marco Simone on Saturday morning. And if you turned your nose into the wind you might, eventually, have followed it all the way to the US locker room, where their hopes and dreams of winning in Europe for the first time since 1993 lay in a messy heap, decomposing in the heat.
“It’s done,” said the US captain, Zach Johnson, when his team were five points down on Friday night. And it really was, just not in the way Johnson meant, since he was talking about their bad play that day.
