Lee Westwood has come in full support of Padraig Harrington’s revised 2022 European Ryder Cup qualifying points system.

Qualifying for Harrington’s European Team restarts after a long break at this week’s Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship ahead of competition taking place in September.

While the USA Ryder Cup qualifying points process has remained in place since the June 11th, 2020 restart after the Covid-19 related lockdown, European Team qualifying was frozen on July 8th, 2020.

Lee Westwood is backing Padraig Harrington’s tweaking of the European Ryder Cup qualifying points system with the 2022 selection process restarting this week in Abu Dhabi

All points earned to date on both the European and World Points lists, which started at the 2019 BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth and which were paused after the 2020 Commercial Bank Qatar Masters in March this year, will continue to count.

However, starting this week and up to May, Ryder Cup points will be multiplied by 1.5 and then from May to the final event for qualifying, points will be doubled.

And Westwood, who has played in every Ryder Cup since 1997 to 2016 and then was a vice-captain in 2018, fully agrees.

“There are a few people who won a few points before it was halted last year  but Pádraig has taken the decision to change the points system into more like a bonus system, the closer you get to The Ryder Cup the more points you play for,” said Westwood ahead of teeing-up in his defence of this week’s Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship.

“It makes complete sense that you have players there that are on form. Someone who was playing well two years ago isn’t necessarily playing well now.

“You want your strongest and best team, a team on form, when you play the Americans in The Ryder Cup. We’re
playing for a lot of points these first few weeks but as the year goes on, they double.  So you need to play consistently well through the year”.

Westwood is currently lying ninth on the primary European points list and eighth on the World points table.

The recently-crowned four-time winning 2020 AGW ‘Golfer of the Year’ was asked if he will consider adding events to his 2021 schedule in the goal of teeing-up in what would be a remarkable 11th European Team appearance.

“I’ve made my schedule for the year now, the three events here then I’ll be going off to the States to play the WGC, Arnold Palmer, The Players, Honda, Match Play, week off, Masters,” he said.

“That’s a long run of six tournaments in seven weeks. More than I would normally but there’s a lot of World Ranking
points to play for this time of year in Florida and up to the Masters.

“That’s the main reason for that.

“Then I’ll have a mid-season break, get going at the British Masters at The Belfry and then the PGA Championship. It won’t be such a long run of tournaments after that but I’ll be giving myself more breaks through there.

“Being top 50 in the World I’d planned to play a good number of events over there. With travel as unpredictable as it is and things going the way they are I wanted to get over to America and base myself over there for a couple of months.

“It makes sense not to try and get on airplanes too much and travel from one country to another if you can base yourself in one spot, that makes complete sense.

“The run is nothing to do with The Ryder Cup, the schedule I penned out would have been the schedule were it a non-Ryder Cup year.”