If you’re Australian and a reader of a glossy sports magazine such as this crackerjack journal, chances are you have an allegiance to a sports team. Could be one from Australian rules, could be one from a code of rugby, could be one from the game known as “football” in this and most other countries, though let us not go delving into #CodeWar rabbit holes; there can be no coming back.

Instead, let’s stay on positive ground and posit that if you’re a team sports fan – Go You Raiders! Up the Arsenal! and so on – you would also likely support our national teams: the cricketers, the Matildas, even the wobbly old Wallabies. Every four years at the Games of the so many Roman numerals Olympiad, Australians invest in the fortunes of teams – basketball, rugby 7s, our awesome coxless fours.

But ask yourself: do you care, viscerally, in your plumbs, as they say – or even just in passing – about the International team in the Presidents Cup? Do you support the Internationals as you might the Wanderers, Waratahs or Bulldogs of both stripes? Do you support – can you support – a 12-man team of golfers representing a claque of disparate nation states?

Europeans seem to care, of course, for their continent in the Ryder Cup. That is a hoot, the Ryder Cup, with great gaggles of Irish, French, Italians and Swedes painting faces, chanting in unison and creating all that great “colour” beloved of Big TV and the advertisers thereon. Certainly looks like they’re having fun.

And Americans care, of course, for their team in the season-ending team events named for their Presidents and after Samuel Ryder, who was born in Lancashire in 1858 and who took up golf at the age of 50 and who invented the Ryder Cup in 1926 in which the 10-man team of professionals from the United States included four Brits and Joe Kirkwood from Manly.

And why not? They are supporting country as it takes on all-comers in events showcasing the greatest players in the world. To be American and follow the United States of America means flags and star-spangled action, and all the unbridled