The increase in captain’s picks, which will see Colin Montgomerie choosing three of the Ryder Cup team for next year, is significant.
It means the difference between players such as Justin Rose or Ian Poulter representing 
If the same qualification process had been running since last September as it did ahead of Valhalla, Fernandez-Castano would be in the last automatic position going into this week’s BMW PGA Championship.
With all due respect to Spain’s world No60, he is not exactly a name that is going to strike fear into the Americans. In scrabble maybe, but not in a Ryder Cup.
The scrapping of one of the qualifying places and switch to an extra wild card, in a reversion to a system last employed by Europe in 1993, should allow Montgomerie to improve the depth of his team.
“Europe obviously would have seen the merit of us doing that the last time, going up from two to four,” said Montgomerie’s opposite number Corey Pavin. “Certainly the more picks a captain has the more flexibility he has in creating his team.
“But you have to balance the fact you want players to earn their way on to the team and not have too many picks.”
In accepting three picks from the tournament committee, Montgomerie had to settle for the compromise predicted on these pages last week so as to make sure the integrity of the European Tour was not diluted.
It is a pity he did not get his own way entirely. If he had been given four slots, like Paul Azinger had for the Americans at Valhalla last year, the picture would have looked even better for Europe.
This attempt to double the wild-card quotient was dismissed in some quarters as an example of the captain’s vanity and, where Montgomerie is concerned, such an argument always has some validity. In this case, though, it was self-aggrandisement with the team’s interests at heart.
Have a look at the European side if the event were to be staged now. From the world points list, the four players who would have qualified are Paul Casey, Henrik Stenson, Sergio Garcia and Rory McIlroy, always assuming Irish genius McIlroy wanted to play. Fine players all and fit to grace any European team.
But from the European Tour points list, which now submits five players, there would be Robert Karlsson and four rookies – Soren Kjeldsen, Alvaro Quiros, Ross Fisher and Martin Kaymer.
With three wild-card places on offer to complete the line-up, two of which would unquestionably go to Padraig Harrington and Lee Westwood, it still leaves too much talent on the outside.
Six players from Nick Faldo’s team would be battling for that one place, plus the most contentious exclusion last time, Darren Clarke, and Luke Donald, who missed out through injury.
Montgomerie would have to assess their merits and then weigh them against those of Rose, who beat Phil Mickelson in the singles in Kentucky, or his playing partner Poulter, who thrived under the spotlight.
He could equally find himself pulled towards the experience of Miguel Angel Jimenez, a veteran of three Ryder Cups, or Graeme McDowell, Oliver Wilson and Soren Hansen who know what it is like to take on the Americans.
A fourth pick would not have solved all the problems but it would give Montgomerie the sort of flexibility Azinger used to blend the right mix of characters into his victorious team of last year.
The Americans split their team into sub-divisions dependent on their personalities, and also used bonding techniques borrowed from the military. When Azinger put the whole back together again, he found a stronger entity.
It is unlikely Montgomerie will turn to the SAS. But an SOS may be in order if the side are shaping up the same way in 12 months.
Europe’s team, if selected under the new system with a qualifying start-date from last year’s Omega European Masters, would be: Casey, Stenson, Garcia, McIlroy, Kjeldsen, Karlsson, Quiros, Fisher, Kaymer and three Montgomerie wild cards.
