He may have been something of a master tactician during his successful stint as European skipper at the Ryder Cup but Paul McGinley’s efforts at keeping his 49th birthday under wraps yesterday were about as successful as Tom Watson’s American captaincy. As the guest of honour at the PGA’s annual luncheon in Glasgow, a lavish, glass-clinking knee-ups that would have made Caligula’s shin-digs look fairly hum-drum, the popular Irishman was greeted on to the stage with a rousing rendition of ‘happy birthday to you’ from the well fed and watered attendees. “I’ve been trying to keep it quiet but word has got out on that one,” he said with a wry smile.

The word on the street is that Team USA, galvanised by task forces, youthful exuberance and a general determination to end a wretched run of eight Ryder Cup defeats in the last 10 transatlantic tussles, will be the favourites to succeed when they cross swords again with Europe at Hazeltine next September.

Despite their dominance in recent years, the tag of underdog suits the European top dogs to a tee and McGinley, who simply revelled in his role as captain at Gleneagles last year, is more than happy to see the pressure being cranked up on the Americans.

After Phil Mickelson’s public spearing of the aforementioned Watson in the aftermath of the USA’s 16 1/1 – 11 ½ defeat in Perthshire, an awkward, squirming spectacle that was as uncomfortable as sliding down a splintered bannister in the scuddy, the Americans have drawn on just about everything, from past players, past captains and whatever lurks under the jowls of the heids on Mount Rushmore in a huge overhaul of their Ryder Cup system. Davis Love III, back by popular demand, has been given the captaincy again, Tiger Woods has already been handed a high-profile vice-captaincy role and everything seems to be rosy in Camp America. McGinley knows Europe will face a tough test against a host nation that will be led by Jordan Spieth but the Dubliner is more than happy with the way things are beginning to develop, even with the biennial battle some nine months away. “They (the US) are under massive, massive pressure,” said McGinley, during an afternoon when retired Glasgow Golf Club professional Jack Steven was given a PGA Lifetime Achievement award. “They’ve put things in place that, they think, puts all the odds in their favour. You travel around America and everyone there thinks this will be a walkover for them. But playing with expectation on your shoulders is a difficult position to be in because you’ve got nowhere to go from there. It’s certainly a dynamic that we can take advantage of. I’m not saying they won’t deal with it, but it brings a lot of expectation. We had to deal with that expectation at Gleneagles because a lot of people were saying it was a foregone conclusion because we had won seven out of the previous nine and we had four out of the top five players in the world. We had to deal with that.”

McGinley, who was involved in every Ryder Cup since 1999 – apart for 2008 – in some capacity and admits he does miss the whole, all-consuming hoopla, reflected on one of his early professional experiences when he met the great Jack Nicklaus as he expanded on the sense of pressure that will weigh heavily on USA shoulders next year.

“One of the things I wanted to know was who his (Nicklaus’s) toughest competitor was,” recalled McGinley, of a dinner with the 18-time major winner back in 1992 when a fair amount of red wine was being consumed. “I asked him the big question I wanted to know most and he thought about it for five minutes and eventually looked at his son, Gary, and said ‘I haven’t even admitted this to your mother, but my toughest competitor was (Lee) Trevino’. He said ‘every Tuesday at a major championship Lee Trevino would walk into the press tent and all he’d do during his whole press conference was tell everybody how great a player Jack Nicklaus is. He would say every time I went head-to-head he was the only guy who had a winning ratio against me because he’d cornered me. I had nowhere to go’. I’ve always remembered that and now I look at the Americans and they are expected to win. That’s a very uncomfortable position to be in. If Europe are going to be slight underdogs then we’ve always revelled in that role.”

With Europe aiming for three successive Ryder Cup triumphs, McGinley believes Darren Clarke’s team will be made up of tried a trusted campaigners. “The usual suspects are going to be back – Rory (McIlroy), Henrik (Stenson) Justin (Rose) - you know the names, they’ll all be there,” he said. “I will be very surprised if there are more than three rookies in the team. All this talk of four or five rookies, I don’t buy it, I think that’s rubbish. We are going to be very strong.”