Despondent Tiger Woods unhappy with form after Ryder Cup defeat

Woods came into the event on the back of a first win in five years at the Tour Championship and supposedly more invested than ever before in the contest having acted as a vice-captain in the victory at Hazeltine in 2016.

However, the 42-year-old lost all three pairs matches - making it eight in a row stretching back to 2010 - and his overall record now reads 13 wins, 21 defeats and three halved matches in eight appearances, only one of which (in 1999) has produced a victory.

“Yeah, I played seven out of nine weeks because I qualified for Akron and you know, all of those are big events, starting with the Open Championship,” said Woods, who lost 2&1 to Jon Rahm in yesterday’s singles.

“You’ve got a World Golf Championships, you’ve got another major championship, you’ve got the [FedEx Cup] play-offs and then you have the Ryder Cup on the back side.

“So a lot of big events, and a lot of focus, a lot of energy goes into it. I was fortunate enough to have won one and we were all coming here on a high and feeling great about our games, about what we were doing, and excited about playing this week.

“For me, it’s been a lot of golf for a short period of time. I’ll have a better understanding of what my training needs to be for next year so that I certainly can endure the entire season, because this year was very much up in the air of how much I would play or if I would play at all.”