The slogan of the 2014 Ryder Cup, plastered across just about every flat surface at Gleneagles, was 'Where Legends are Forged'.

Not for Tom Watson, though. This was the place where his legend took a serious bashing.

Watson renewed his love affair with Scotland and the Scottish galleries at Turnberry in 2009, when he came within an inch of winning the Open Championship and writing the greatest fairytale sport had ever known. At that point, someone should have had a quiet word in his ear and told him that going out at the top is the most graceful form of retirement. Instead, he chose to plough on.

In fairness, he could still play a bit, making the cut at three of the next five Opens, including this year's event at Hoylake. Now 65, it has been a remarkable Indian summer for the man who lifted the claret jug five times between 1975 and 1983, but it has still felt like a farewell tour. Sadly, his Ryder Cup captaincy appears to have been conducted along the same lines.

Watson has bumbled through his captaincy period amiably enough. It is hard to dislike a man whose conversational style might have been honed by reading the epilogue to Little House on the Prairie. But all that homespun wisdom and all those avuncular aphorisms count for nothing in the heat of a modern Ryder Cup battle. As far as his preparations were concerned, Watson gave the impression that he had armed himself with a peashooter to take on Paul McGinley's tanks.

McGinley has talked of the "template" a succession of European captains have created. It has never existed in any physical form - the nearest to that has been the stack of notebooks the Irishman has filled with his thoughts over the past few years, but it is embedded in the culture of the team. Put simply, the Europeans know how to win this thing, know what makes a critical difference; the Americans, to all intents and purposes, have been clueless.

Their roll call of captains goes a long way to explaining why. Since the Ryder Cup's inception in 1927, every man who has led the American team has been a major champion. It has been an impressive show of force, certainly, but it has also demonstrated an over-reliance on qualities that have no bearing on the modern staging of the event. Sport needs its grand old goats as figureheads and even moral reference points, but it doesn't need them running the show.

Even before Phil Mickelson's smiling assassination of Watson last night, the best any American player could say about their captain was that he was a legend in the game, one of the greatest players who ever lived. Hard to argue with either point, but what of his organisational skills, his man-management, his attention to detail? The Americans had nothing to say on those matters, the areas Team Europe highlighted when talking about McGinley.

It can hardly be held against Watson that he is more than three times the age of 21-year-old Jordan Spieth, the youngest player on the US team. However, the American captain's admission that he had not even attended a Ryder Cup since 1993, his previous leadership stint, was startling. He had no first-hand knowledge of how the tournament, much changed over the past two decades, now plays out, and no direct experience of how meticulous a captain's operation must now be.

McGinley, by contrast, had become a Ryder Cup animal. A player in 2002, 2004 and 2006, he then served his apprenticeship as a vice-captain in 2010 and 2012. And all the while Watson was watching it on television.

It is often said, and usually unfairly, that American players do not take this event as seriously as their European opponents. In the heat of battle, they most certainly do, but they are coming up short behind the scenes.

It is not the whole story of America's dreadful recent record - they have now lost eight of the past 10 Ryder Cups - but a significant chapter of that book could be devoted to the blunders of the men who led them.

In 1995, Lanny Wadkins gave a wild card to his out-of-form friend Curtis Strange, who rewarded him by returning zero points from three matches. In 2002, Strange was the captain who failed to second-guess Sam Torrance's singles strategy, put his big guns out last and watched the boards turn blue. In 2004, Hal Sutton managed to forget how many children he had as he tried to praise them in his introductory speech, then put Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson together in one of the most disastrous Ryder Cup pairings of all time.

In 2010, Corey Pavin handed over team uniform issues to his wife Lisa, who came up with waterproofs that were so hopelessly inadequate for the torrential conditions in Wales that team officials had to buy new ones from a concession stand.

And now Watson has added to that catalogue of captains' calamities. His choice of Webb Simpson as a wild card backfired badly when the former US Open winner had a nightmare opening morning and was benched for the next three sessions. He left Keegan Bradley and Phil Mickelson, his most charismatic pairing, on the sidelines for all of Saturday.

He rewarded an outstanding performance by rookies Jordan Spieth and Patrick Reed in the Friday fourballs by dropping them for the Friday foursomes. If there was any logic to his Sunday singles order, it certainly wasn't apparent.

Watson will say a more fitting farewell to Scotland when he plays his final Open at St Andrews.

We will cheer him when he walks over the Swilcan Bridge for the last time, cherishing our memories of one of golf's greatest players and greatest figures. Well, most of them at least. Hopefully we will be overtaken by amnesia on the matter of his past few days in Perthshire.