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No matter that the Europeans have a better team on paper, no matter that their average world ranking is marginally higher and no matter that their players, man for man, have more experience. The Americans can clearly win back this 37th Ryder Cup - they just need what, in recent matches, they have so palpably lacked: a performance.

To get the US dozen to perform is a job description for Paul Azinger that his recent predecessors, Tom Lehman, Hal Sutton and Curtis Strange, have clearly failed to fulfil. And so yesterday, Azinger was asked why it was that his countrymen, in recent matches, have left their best golf at home. And this was where he and his temperament came up a little short.

Azinger replied that US Ryder Cup teams had not done well recently because the team selection system - that he has since changed - had been flawed. This, though, did not explain why the team who were selected had still underperformed. And asked the question again, Azinger replied in curt, clipped sentences: “The past is the past. What difference does the past make to us? Those are different teams, different players, different courses, different times. We’re looking now to the future. I don’t care about the past. I can’t answer those questions for you. I really don’t know the answers.” Ouch.

This was the same Azinger who, moments earlier, had been asked to describe his relationship with Nick Faldo 10 to 15 years ago. The history between Azinger and Faldo was obviously going to be raised here - it has been on the news agenda for months - and yet Azinger went straight for the bait.

“I don’t know anybody that had a relationship with Nick 10 or 15 years ago,” he said. “So I’m probably not that different from anybody else. I never heard the guy complete a sentence in the first 20 years I knew him. And now his voice activation has switched on and he can’t turn it off.” And then, when asked if he regretted his selection of vice-captains, he got even stroppier.

Now, Azinger, we know, is emotional about this event. It means a lot to him. Frank Nobilo, the former player who is now a Golf Channel analyst, yesterday described him as one of the two Americans to whom this event meant the most. “Zinger and Payne Stewart, and oddly enough, they were two very good friends,” he said. “Two great competitors.”

The question is how he uses this emotion as a catalyst for the quality that his players clearly possess. Severiano Ballesteros’s captaincy was run on emotion and it worked, Hal Sutton used emotion and pride and got it cataclysmically wrong. Ben Crenshaw went completely mushy but managed to stir the Brookline Sunday into such a festival of nationalism that his players did indeed respond.

One of the roles of a leader in an event such as this, where tension rules, is to rise above it, to show the rest of the team that you can be impervious to it. Azinger may well carry this off in the team room, although yesterday - three days from the start - he made interesting viewing.

Out on the course, a serious charm offensive was being waged. He wants the galleries here to be his “thirteenth man” and so his players had been advised to stop to sign autographs and to hand out specially commissioned American team pin-badges - 10,000 of them.

There will also be some kind of a “pep rally” in town on Thursday evening. Indeed, the role of the good guys is being so keenly played that when two small children - Alan and Maddie Hamilton, of Louisville - asked Dave Stockton, one of Azinger’s assistant captains, for an autograph, Stockton pulled them out of the crowd, invited them down the middle of the fairway and had the players and Azinger sign their caps.

And when J. B. Holmes thumped his driver on the 352-yard, par-four 13th at the elevated green that is guarded by a water hazard, Azinger stayed behind on the tee and waited for feed-back over his walkie-talkie to report to the gallery, to tumultuous applause, that the drive had carried the green.

Quite the conductor of good news, then. Winning over the crowd is no new trick but it clearly makes sense to have a thirteenth man helping along the other 12.

Nobilo, who knows Azinger well, believes he is the right man for creating the right environment for his team. “It’s not like other Americans don’t get the Ryder Cup,” he said. “It’s just that Zinger embraced it more than others. I think he’s trying to bring that to his rookie players. His best Ryder Cup, in his mind, was his rookie experience. So I think that’s why it’s a new-look American team and he’s probably the perfect captain for that.” But every captain manages to look half-decent from long range. Even Sutton gave the impression of someone on top of his game.

It is when the game starts and tension holds sway that charm and temperament and confidence become far less easy to display. And that is when Azinger’s players will really need him to show those qualities, which are exactly what Azinger seemed to be short on yesterday. Every American captain in the recent losing streak has cared. No one doubts that. Being emotional and caring about the Ryder Cup may be Azinger’s strong card, but not if he plays it wrong.