Ryder Cup flavour as DeChambeau and Rahm clash in Chicago
It’s the LIV Golf League Team Championship this weekend in Texas, where old adversaries Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm will captain the top two sides in the hunt for £10m.
The Ryder Cup may be 12 months away and the Solheim Cup now disappearing in the rear-view mirror but there is another transatlantic team golf clash taking place this weekend.
At Maridoe Golf Club near Dallas, Bryson DeChambeau and his Crushers will be aiming to retain the LIV Golf Team Championship in the circuit’s season finale.
Their biggest rivals for the crown are Legion XIII, the expansion team captained by Jon Rahm, who won the LIV Golf individual crown last weekend in Chicago.
Play starts on Friday but the top three seeds – Crushers, Legion XIII and Cameron Smith’s Ripper – have secured a bye into Saturday’s semi-finals.
US Ryder Cup star DeChambeau is looking to round off a year in which he won his second major at the US Open but finished a best of fourth in 13 LIV Golf events.
His Crushers topped the team standings on three occasions, however, including at back-to-back tournaments in Jeddah and Hong Kong early this year.
On that front he has been ably assisted by teammates Paul Casey and Anirban Lahiri. The top seeds were the only team to have three players finish in the individual top 20.
Rahm, who has won two Ryder Cups with Europe, can become the first man to do the individual-team double in LIV Golf’s admittedly short history.
The Spaniard is in red-hot form, having won two of the last three events to overtake Joaquin Niemann and finish on top of the standings.
Legion XIII have won a league-high four times this year, thanks in the most part to Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton, who won in Nashville and finished fourth in the standings.
There was little between the top two but in a fairly distant third, Ripper were the best of the rest. Former Open champion Smith led by example with three runner-up finishes.
If there is to be an upset then perhaps it will come from Brooks Koepka’s Smash. Both captain and team won twice in LIV Golf this year, including the double at Greenbrier last month.
Koepka, who finished fifth in the individual table, can also call on the 2023 champion Talor Gooch, 10th this year, and Jason Kokrak, who was third at Greenbrier.
The Team Championship format means that Koepka’s men will have to beat Kevin Na’s Iron Heads on Friday to reach the semi-finals which, confusingly, feature eight teams.
And scoring is not straightforward either. The first two rounds are matchplay, with three points up for grabs in two singles contests and one foursomes.
Then Sunday’s four-team final reverts to strokeplay, with scores from all players on each team counting towards the final tallies – and a £10m first prize.