By the time Richie Ramsay gets to the European Tour’s flagship event, the BMW PGA Championship, at the end of the month, the Scot will have probably forgotten how to play routine, 72-hole strokeplay golf.

His schedule up until then is not quite golf as we know it, more like something out of the Innovations Catalogue; you know, that publication of quirks and curiosities in which you could purchase an egg timer that doubled up as a screw driver and bottle opener.

This step into the world of golfing experimentation ended prematurely on Saturday as Ramsay, and his playing partner Scott Jamieson, failed to qualify from the group stages of the GolfSixes at The Centurion Club.

While the inspired Irish pairing of Gavin Moynihan and Paul Dunne took the ultimate honours last night with a 2-0 win over the French duo of Romain Wattel and Mike Lorenzo-Vera in the final, Ramsay was looking forward to another stab at something a bit different.

The 34-year-old is giving the forthcoming Rocco Forte Sicilian Open a miss and will return to action in a fortnight for the Belgian Knockout, another “innovative” addition to the European Tour’s diary.

This new tournament, hosted by the Belgian Ryder Cup player Thomas Pieters, will see players contest 36-holes of strokeplay over the first couple of days. Nothing earth-shattering there, then. But the format will change for the weekend with the top 64 players progressing to the knock-out stages played over nine holes of matchplay golf.

It’s hardly a revolutionary idea, of course. Most top end amateur events have the strokeplay stage followed by the head-to-head phase and Ramsay was well versed in that type of golfing combat during his successful stint in the unpaid ranks.

As he prepares for more dabblings into fresh, suck-it-and-see formats on the professional front, the three-time European Tour winner believes the simplicity of the Belgian tournament is its strength.

Amid a non-golfing crowd, there has been suggestions that this weekend’s GolfSixes could be made even more basic. The greensomes format – whereby both players on the team have a tee shot, pick the best of the two and then play alternate shots from there – may be easy to fathom for regular golfers but some casual observers out on the course were still not quite sure what was happening even though they were lapping up the fare on offer.

“I like the idea of the Belgian format, which is simple,” noted Ramsay. “It’s strokeplay, it’s matchplay, anybody can understand that. It starts getting difficult when you make it quite complicated. You are trying to attract people who would not ordinarily go to a golf tournament. They need to understand the format straight away.

“The 72-hole format is always going to be the core but bringing that into an Amateur Championship-type deal, where it’s strokeplay and then matchplay is a good idea. They don’t have to be counting tournaments (for order of merit) all the time. You could have some kind of silly season, where there’s a ladies tour player, a main tour player, a senior player and just have a month where there’s a break and you use those tournaments to generate interest.”

There was plenty of interest generated over a lively couple of days in the sunny south and the glorious weather certainly helped the come-all-ye, festival vibe.

As often is the case with these knock-out affairs, the favourites of the majority of the fans were sent packing as the England women’s team, the England men’s team and a European female duo lost in the quarter-finals to Ireland, France and Australia respectively.

It was left to the Irish and the French – both teams had beaten Scotland in the group stages – to fight it out for the title and, in the end, Moynihan and Dunne were celebrating a sixes win which gave them both a handy five figure cheque of some £90,000.

It was a strange week for Moynihan. The 23-year-old, who won the Scottish Amateur Open Strokeplay title in 2013, has missed 10 successive cuts on both the European Tour and the Challenge Tour this season but found his form in the matchplay format and savoured a memorable win.

In 35 holes over the weekend, the Irish pairing dovetailed superbly and were approximately 21-under. “It’s the most fun I’ve had on a golf course since I turned pro,” said Moynihan.