Justin Thomas speaks out over Ryder Cup row

Justin Thomas has defended Jim Furyk in the face of mounting criticism of his Ryder Cup captaincy.

Furyk has found his tactics match at Le Golf National two weeks ago being picked apart, including by one of his own players, Patrick Reed.

However, speaking ahead of this week’s CIMB Classic in Malaysia, former world No.1 Thomas has said that the finger-pointing is unfair.

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“It’s so easy to look at the captains and say it’s their fault but, at the end of the day we didn’t play well enough,” said the 25-year-old, the USA’s top points-scorer in France. “The Europeans played exponentially better than we did, that’s why they beat us as bad they did.”

Reed was particularly aggrieved that his previously successful partnership with Jordan Spieth was split up to accommodate a new Spieth/Thomas pairing.

Thomas, though, says that Reed and Spieth’s past success in the biennial battle – they won five points out of a potential seven from matches they’d played together previously – promised no guarantee of success this time around.

“It’s easy to look at pairings and say, well, we should have done this or we could have done that, but it doesn’t matter if you put the two winningest guys of all time together – if they don’t play well, they’re going to lose,” he said.

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On the subject of he and Spieth being paired together, Thomas added: “That was something obviously that had been talked about in advance but all I was worried about was I knew that I was going to play with Jordan and we were worrying about taking care of our point.

“Everybody has their own thoughts and feelings, but at the end of the day we just didn’t play well enough.”