Just think of it. A pairing of a man who drives the ball as straight and far as anyone in the world and is one of the purest strikers in the game with a man who has golf’s strongest mind, excluding Tiger Woods, as well as a world-class short game. It’s a dream pairing, isn’t it? The strengths of the one complementing the strengths of the other.

But having thought about it for a moment, forget it because it will never happen. Sergio García will never be paired with Padraig Harrington because they don’t like each other. The dislike that two of the biggest names in European golf have for one another is a typically gentlemanly, golfing sort of dislike. They are, apparently, two men united only by playing the same game. They are separated by almost everything else.

“Sergio is the antithesis of me and I am the antithesis of him,” Harrington said this month. “We have zero in common bar the fact that we both play golf. We play the game in exactly the opposite way. He is destined to make the long game easy and the short game hard and I am the opposite.”

Seeing these words on a printed page for the first time, García tightens his jaw. He makes no attempt to conceal the differences with the man who pipped him to this year’s US PGA title at Oakland Hills. “I am not going to lie to you,” García said. “He is not my best friend.

“There has never been a connection between us because our personalities are quite different. Some people you feel connected to and some you don’t. He has taken two majors out of me and perhaps people are trying to make it a bigger reason than it is.

“In a Ryder Cup, it would probably not be good for us to be paired together. I don’t think we would make a bad pairing. Game-wise, we would work together but chemistry-wise, it would not work. I wouldn’t be able to tell him some of the things I tell Luke if we are playing in a Ryder Cup. I don’t know how he will react.”