Poor old Hal Sutton. He was probably sitting at home in Louisiana, buffing up his Stetson and pondering a day of white tail deer hunting with a Winchester '73 when all of a sudden he finds himself getting retrospectively lambasted for something that happened 12 years ago. Who’d be a Ryder Cup captain eh?

Back in ye day, the skipper’s role seemed to be fairly straight forward. “Boys, let me tell you something,” said Ben Hogan to his US troops of 1967. “You don't have to be a rocket scientist to do this job. I'm going to pair straight hitters with straight hitters and crooked hitters with crooked hitters so you won't find yourselves in unfamiliar places.”

Here in 2016, past captains are being hung, drawn and quartered for historical golf crimes. And Phil Mickelson is the eager executioner. Two years ago, his very public condemnation of Tom Watson’s tenure in the grisly aftermath of the USA’s hefty defeat at Gleneagles left all and sundry squirming like a bag of harpooned eels. From the blood, guts and general debris of that emerged the US Task Force that was going to revolutionise the American approach to this biennial battle.

Davis Love III was brought back in and, by all accounts, is the most popular skipper since Captain Birdseye while every player is now “invested in the process” as democracy replaces tyranny.

As for the aforementioned Sutton? Well, it seems the failures of yesteryear are still sticking in Mickelson’s craw to this day. Having played in every Ryder Cup since 1995, Mickelson knows what the biennial bunfight is all about and he is absolutely determined to ensure that the lessons from history now shape the future.

While stating that Watson’s old-school, off the cuff and stubborn approach put the US “in a position to fail” at Gleneagles, Mickelson delved further into a dossier of dodgy decisions and recalled Sutton’s insistence on pairing him with Tiger Woods in both foursomes and fourballs during the 2004 match at Oakland Hills. The result? Two losses in an ultimately dreadful 18 ½ - 9 ½ drubbing by a rampant Europe.

"We were told two days before that we were playing together and that gave us no time to work together and prepare," explained Mickelson, who was clearly eager to get this nagging niggle of his chest. "He (Tiger) found out the year before when we played at the Presidents Cup that the golf ball I was playing was not going to work for him. He plays a very high-spin ball and I play a very low-spin ball, and we had to come up with a solution in two days.

"So I grabbed a couple dozen of his balls, I went off to the side and tried to learn his golf ball in a four or five-hour session. Had we known a month in advance, we might have been able to make it work.

"I'm not trying to knock anybody here, because I actually loved how decisive a captain Sutton was. I feel like that's a sign of great leadership to be decisive.

"But that's an example of starting with the captain that put us in a position to fail and we failed monumentally. To say, ‘well, you just need to play better’, that is so misinformed because you will play how you prepare.

"I've had to be accountable for that decision 12 years ago. Even a month ago, I hear there's an analyst on the Golf Channel that accuses me of being a non-team player for having to go out and work on an isolated hole away from the team (in 2004).

“I don’t know if you can imagine how frustrating it would be to care so much about something like I do about the Ryder Cup and be accountable for many of the decisions that have taken place when you’re not part of those decisions.”

Mickelson is certainly getting his say this time. Compared to the autocratic rule of Watson, the US camp of 2016 feels as open and as liberated as a hippy commune. Love III maintains he is “in charge” but there are plenty of divisions of labour. Whether this happy camp have finally found a winning formula remains to be seen. Mickelson certainly thinks so. “The difference is that when players are put in a position to succeed, more often than not, they tend to succeed,” he added. “And when they are put in positions to fail, most of the time they tend to fail. This is a year where we feel as though captain Love has been putting us in a position to succeed. He's taken input from all parties. He's making decisions that have allowed us to prepare our best and play our best, and I believe that we will play our best.”