As Matt Fitzpatrick worked on his short game around the greens at Bethpage Black, a group of American fans saw an opportunity to get in his ear. They laughed at a couple of his duffed chips from the long grass and loudly predicted that he won’t be picked to play in the Friday morning foursomes by European captain Luke Donald.

“They were telling me, ‘Oh, you’re probably going to be here (practising chipping) on Friday’,” Fitzpatrick smiled. “I was like, ‘Yeah, you’re probably right to be fair’.”

There is an awful lot of talk in the build-up to a Ryder Cuppatently too much talk. As rain poured down on the golf course on Thursday, the final press conferences wandered off on strange tangents as the media tried to squeeze out yet more talking points. At one point, Viktor Hovland spent a good two minutes discussing his interest in UFOs.

Everything has been said, at least twice. There is little new ground to scrape over, partly because the European team is virtually identical to the one in Rome and the pairings will be similar too. So the questions kept coming back to one irrepressible theme. Europe won it at home. But can they win it away? Can they play to the same high level while a wise-cracking New Yorker tells them they need a few shots of Ozempicas Jon rahm experienced during his practice round?

Each player will have to find their own way through a febrile atmosphere. Sepp Straka talked of getting lost in his routine and Bob MacIntyre said he would be dead-eye focused only on the one thing he could control, his golf swing. Others, like Fitzpatrick and Rahm, plan to embrace the American sense of humour and enjoy it.

“It was good fun,” Fitzpatrick said of his run-in with US fans. “I think you’ve got to buy into it. I was having a good laugh with those boys, we had a good laugh there and they actually followed us for a couple of holes. I think you’ve got to take it on the chin, whatever it is. What makes this event so fun, so special, is the fans. It’s obviously a great opportunity for us to come and try and play our best golf in front of them.”

Fitzpatrick said his parents won’t be here at Bethpage partly because they had a horrible experience watching him play at Whistling Straits four years ago. American fans rained down abuse, including one particularly disturbing comment which called for Fitzpatrick’s opponent, Daniel Berger, to “slit his throat”.

It is a tale which stretches back through the generations, to when Colin Montgomerie’s father walked off the course at Brookline in 1999 due to the ugly insults aimed at his son. There has not any great malice during the practice rounds here so far, but Collin Morikawa’s call for “chaos” when play begins on Friday suggests the Americans wouldn’t mind engineering some.

Hovland, perhaps the most likeable man in golf, is not used to animosity but insisted he is well prepared for what might be thrown at him around Bethpage. “They won’t really come close to the thoughts that I have in my own head,” he laughed. “I’ll just try to smile it off and make a few birdies. That usually seems to do the trick.”

Rahm says the Ozempic line was “funny”, and as one of Team Europe’s two clear leaders alongside Rory McIlroyhe is likely to be a target for plenty more barbs over the weekend.

“So far the humour’s been there,” he said. “I would imagine tomorrow things might turn a little bit but there’s always funny ones, and not only towards me, towards everybody. I’m not going to say what they said but yesterday, on 17, me and Shane Lowry had a good laugh at something someone said in the crowd. People can be really creative nowadays.”

McIlroy knows that he will be another lightning rod out on the course.

“I’m very lucky, I get a lot of support pretty much everywhere I go when I play golf,” he said on the eve of his eighth Ryder Cup. “It’s going to feel a little different for me this week, but that’s to be expected and that’s totally understandable.

“I felt like at Hazeltine (in 2016) I probably engaged too much at times, and then at Whistling Straits (in 2021) I didn’t engage enough and felt pretty flat because of it. It’s just trying to find that balance. I can’t tell anyone on the team what that balance is, they really have to find it themselves.

“That’s the challenge of playing away, right? Someone in the American team holes a putt and then you have to try to follow them in, but you’ve got the crowd going crazy and you’re waiting for them to go quiet. There’s a lot of little things that take you out of your normal routine, that you just have to deal with.”

Of all the pretty mundane things said on Thursday – Tyrell Hatton took saying absolutely nothing of consequence to masterful levels – it was McIlroy who perhaps best summed up this Ryder Cup and its place in the great story. In some ways it is just another edition, and yet there is the sense that this week offers the best opportunity since Medinah for any team to break the home hegemony on both sides of the Atlantic.

“Since 2012, you look at the results of the Ryder Cup, the home team has won every time,” McIlroy added. “But they also have won convincingly. It’s been pretty one-sided either way. So whatever team, whether that’s Europe or America, is the one to break that duck, honestly, is going to go down as one of the best teams in Ryder Cup history. Luke said it in his opening remarks yesterday – we are here and we are playing for history.”

And so it all comes back to that one defining point, that key difference from two years ago – really the only difference. Europe were fueled by the fire of Rome. Now they must play inside the heat of a New York cauldron, and each player must find their own way through.

One player who isn’t worried? Sepp Straka. “Fortunately for me,” smiled the Austrian, “I don’t think that much of the crowd knows who I am.”

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