Former Manchester United boss Alex Ferguson is the man Europe captain Paul McGinley has asked to address his team on the eve of the Ryder Cup. "The one thing he asked me to do was keep it quiet, we wanted a bit of a surprise for the players. But I guess it's not a surprise," McGinley told a news conference.
"There are a number of things that he's dealing with that he was particularly good at that I think he'll be a particularly strong fit. There's a lot of similarities, and I've met him a number of times over the last few months. The more I've met him, the more there was just such a natural fit."
McGinley said he played with Ferguson in a pro-am 15 years ago and, after a few subsequent meetings, asked him to help out once he had been named captain.
"This is not about him being a headmaster and coming in and preaching to them. This is about fun," said McGinley.
"The areas that I'll be talking to the players about, him relating it to football and getting some football stories. So I very much like to think that we're both coming from the same direction and he's talking along the lines that I'll be talking this week."
"He is a big fan of golf, as we know," added McGinley. "He knew a lot about the players and he'd watched them and observed a lot of them and was very keen on getting to meet the ones he had not met. And of course the players are mad about football, every one of them."
