Guy Mitchell picks a team in September. He has played three singles matches in this tournament and lost all three. Every point he has ever scored came out of a scramble.
There is no polite way to present the following. Guy Mitchell will captain a side at the Kootenay Cup, and the record he brings to the role is the least encouraging document on this website.
Three singles matches in Lisbon. Three defeats. Twice to Tom Cartwright, once to Liam Wilkinson — the man he now opposes.
He lost the four-ball on the Monday. He lost the low ball on the Tuesday. He was beaten four and three at West Cliffs on the Wednesday, one up at Royal Óbidos on the Friday, and three and one on the final afternoon.
Both of those came from the Thursday at Bom Sucesso, where all four Sagres players were credited the same two points for a team result. Strip that out and the figure is nought.
Run every man's Lisbon scoring through two hundred thousand simulations and Mitchell starts underdog in every single match-up on the board. Not most. All of them.
His best price is 41% against Cartwright, a man who has already beaten him twice. Against Beswick he is 29%. Against Church, 28%. Against the captain he faces, 40%.
He is also the only player in the field whose handicap has moved the wrong way — 19.7 to 20.2, half a shot, in a year where everybody else who played got better. And in the Low Net market he is priced at 83/1 in a field of seven.
All of which would be conclusive if the evidence were current. It is not.
Mitchell has had a simulator-only winter, a club fitting in March and a couple of lessons since. That is a considerable amount of input and almost no scoring output, which makes him the least readable man in the field rather than simply the worst one. The 113 he shot at West Cliffs sits in the model as data; it may not be true of him any more.
There is also the small matter of why any of this is happening. Mitchell came into the group through Cartwright — they met living in Amsterdam and both moved back to London — and has spent two editions asking, repeatedly and in writing, for a golf course tough enough to hurt him. In the Rockies he gets Wildstone, a Gary Player design, on the Wednesday of the second week.
Captaincy in this tournament is not ceremonial. Mitchell picks alternately with Wilkinson from a single pool — the seven Masturds and the full 8th Man roster — on the Wednesday night, after men's night, with no player pre-assigned to either side.
He will be picking with the same information everybody else has, about players whose numbers he can read as well as anyone, and with one obvious problem: the best pick on the board is Gus Beswick, who has never lost a match, and there is a coin toss deciding who gets first refusal.
The last man to captain a Masturds side having won nothing was James Leigh. He lost by five, and he is not coming back.
Mitchell has forty-two days, a fitting, a winter of simulator work and one round of men's night to make all of the above look like ancient history.