Donald Offering Up Ryder Cup Clues With Wentworth Pairings - McGinley

Paul McGinley says people should absolutely see the grouping of Europe's 12 players at the BMW PGA Championship as clues to possible Ryder Cup pairings, as he did exactly the same when he was captain.

The victorious 2014 European skipper backed Luke Donald in asking for all of his players to play the first two rounds at Wentworth together - and says we should take note of who is playing with who.

McGinley says there's no real time during Ryder Cup week to just magic up some preferred pairings, so Donald is doing the right thing by placing his players with potential partners this week.

It's something McGinley did and from the groupings we can deduce who Donald fancies playing together at Marco Simone in Rome - at least at this stage of his thinking.

Rory McIlroy is playing with Ludvig Aberg and Viktor Hovland, with Tommy Fleetwood, Shane Lowry and Sepp Straka also grouped together.

Jon Rahm is alongside Tyrrell Hatton and Nicolai Hojgaard and English pair Matt Fitzpatrick and Justin Rose are featuring with Robert MacIntyre.

“A lot of it is just trial and error, you don’t have a lot of opportunity in Ryder Cup week to get a lot of wheels in motion," McGinley said on Sky Sports at Wentworth.

"And I certainly took advantage of it when I was Ryder Cup captain, in the whole 12 months leading into it I was pairing guys together.

"It's just forming relationships – it’s not just the players getting to know each other, it’s the caddies as well and understanding each other’s games."

And McGinley likes the look of a couple of potential pairings Donald could deploy in Rome.

"You could certainly look at guys potentially working together no doubt," he added. "Rahm and Hatton have played together before.

"McIlroy and Aberg, that could be a very exciting partnership should that happen or you might have the Scandinavians of Aberg and Hovland together – they did play a practice round together over in Italy and that could ignite too.

"So you look through all of those and you can see, there's a lot of chopping and changing and trial and error going on with Luke and his team behind the scenes and using the opportunity of all 12 players playing in the one event."

And although Donald's thinking is now out there for all to see, including USA captain Zach Johnson, McGinley isn't concerned in the slightest as the pairings aren't even close to being as important as the order they go out in during the Ryder Cup.

"During Ryder Cup week you hear all kinds of rumours - he's going to play with him and 'I just heard this from such and such' but it doesn’t really matter.

"Because its all about what order the go out in, and if you found out what order they were going out in then you can mix it around, but that’s not the case. 

"So I dismissed all of that to be honest and you just focus on what you’re doing and setting out your plan accordingly."