Friday, 28 September, 2001.

The very day the Ryder Cup would have begun had the terrorist atrocities 17 days earlier not forced its postponement for another year. We are gathered in a small room in the Wentworth clubhouse to hear European Tour chief executive Ken Schofield announce the host country for the 2010 event, a bidding war that had been a fierce and often fractious battle between Wales and Scotland.

There was fury in Scottish political circles when Schofield confirmed that Wales would stage the 2010 tournament. So much, in fact, that it went almost unremarked that Scotland had been awarded the 2014 event. At best, it was seen as a consolation prize. How are you meant to celebrate when you have to wait 13 years to open your present?

We will find out this week. After getting on for 5000 days, on Thursday morning it will fall to some poor soul to hit the hardest shot in golf - the one that gets the Ryder Cup under way. His shaking hand will place the ball on the tee and he will look up at the 442-yard opening hole's generously wide fairway. And watch it shrink before his eyes.

It happens to all of them. Even Ian Poulter, Europe's lion and talisman, has admitted to churning nerves in the heat of Ryder Cup battles. Granted, your nerves would probably churn rather more if you were drawn against the mad-eyed Englishman, but it is still the most remarkable factor of the event that men who can keep their cool as they close out Major championships become gibbering wrecks in the context of the biennial transatlantic competition.

And the most compelling, too. No matter how many other tournaments you might have seen, in person or on television, nothing prepares you for the atmosphere of a Ryder Cup. Nothing prepares you for the sudden lurches in fortune, the speed with which a comfortable lead can disappear, the rollercoaster rides between elation and despair. The broad vistas of the Perthshire countryside - well the bits we can see through the fog - will add grandeur to this year's event, but in the heat of the battle, and especially as the competition reaches its closing stages, it will feel as claustrophobic as an airless broom cupboard.

If some reports are to be believed, the American team room at Gleneagles will feel like that from the start. The bookies have made Europe the overwhelming favourites, and recent results go a long way towards telling you why. The US team have won just four of the past 14 matches and they have not claimed a victory on European soil since 1993. Europe won by just a point in 2012, but there is still a sense that the momentum of the so-called Miracle of Medinah is still with them. Whatever the numbers said at the end, it was a crushing loss for the Americans, who blew a seemingly insurmountable four-point lead on the final day as a blue tide washed across those Illinois scoreboards.

Seven of the European team who competed at Medinah will be at Gleneagles this week. Coincidentally, exactly the same number of Americans have survived from 2014. But as this year's event has approached, the US team have almost come to be defined by its absentees. Dustin Johnson has withdrawn while he tries to sort out his private life. Billy Horschel, arguably the hottest player on the planet at the moment, hit form too late to be given a wild card by captain Tom Watson. And, of course, no Tiger.

A Woods-free event is bad news for the TV ratings on the other side of the Atlantic, but it is the Europeans who should probably be more worried. Woods' record in the Ryder Cup - in which he first appeared in 1997 - has been so eye-wateringly awful down the years that a succession of European captains had come to see him as just about their most reliable source of points. Staggeringly for the Americans, only Phil Mickelson has lost more matches than Woods, who has been beaten 17 times, with 16 of those defeats coming in the foursomes/fourballs parts of the event.

In fact, America's solitary victory this century, at Valhalla in 2008, was achieved when Woods was recovering from knee surgery and could not take part. In all of sport, this is probably the starkest demonstration of the validity of the Ewing Theory, which holds that teams are often better when playing without the individual who is generally viewed as their best player.

But still, Europe should expect to win. No disrespect to dear old Tom Watson, but his homilies and homespun wisdom will be of rather less value than the forensic approach Paul McGinley has taken to the task of leading the European side into the contest. Don't go looking for any unturned stones around the PGA Centenary course this week; McGinley has made sure there aren't any.

There is, unquestionably, a steelier edge to Watson than he chooses to reveal in his Little House on the Prairie monologues, but McGinley is a fighter to his marrow. As a player, the Irishman made a little go a long way, and he will demand the same sort of efficiency from his players this week. And the signs all say that they will respond and carry Europe to another win.