Nick Westby: With mental block of winning in US gone it is time for British to deliver

First we had the England football team looking a pale imitation of the Three Lions who had roared through qualification in Rustenburg on Saturday.

On the same day Martin Johnson's rugby boys, fresh from an encouraging finale to the Six Nations, produced a familiarly disappointing conclusion in the first Test against Australia.

And just around the corner is Wimbledon fortnight, the nation's annual opportunity to get giddy about the prospects of a certain Scot.

With so much sport going on, the build-up to one event in which we are becoming increasingly customed to hyping the chances of our chief protagonists has flown under the radar – namely golf's US Open, which tees off at Pebble Beach on Thursday.

Much like the England football team ahead of the World Cup, the expectation surrounding Britain's crop of golfers gets greater by the passing fixture.

But where this golden generation of footballers has shown little so far to prove they are ready to deliver on the promise, British golf does at last appear ready to emerge from the shadows.

Naturally, we have been saying this for many years; having been spoiled by the success of Nick Faldo in the 80s and 90s, the golfing galleries have come to expect success.

But with every major now, Britain sends a healthy contingent across the Atlantic who have proven they are capable of winning in the United States, which in the past has been a mental block for our golfers.

Those barriers are being broken down by the success across the pond of the likes of Rory McIlroy, Paul Casey, Justin Rose, Ian Poulter, Luke Donald and Lee Westwood.

All of them have now won on the US PGA Tour, Rose most recently at the Memorial tournament – and with Westwood in contention at the St Jude Classic in Memphis late last night he was threatening to give us another.

It was Westwood who led the way in 1997 when he won in New Orleans en route to a rise to No 4 in the world.

Now in the second coming of his career, the Worksop golfer has only Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods above him in a world rankings list that is more cluttered at the top end by British talent than it has ever been.

He has been closest to breaking the major duck with four top-three finishes in the big four since the US Open at Torrey Pines in 2008.

With the tournament now back in southern California, at the iconic Pebble Beach, he will lead the charge once more.

McIlroy is the great hope of European golf and proved he had the mental application to supplement that sublime talent when he obliterated the field at Quail Hollow two months ago.

Donald and Casey have won in America in recent years, with the latter contesting an all-English WGC Matchplay final in Arizona in February that Poulter won.

Poulter's confidence sometimes borders on arrogance, but of all the English contingent, he does appear to have the nerve to close out a big tournament.

One man who deserves a bit of luck from the golfing gods is Londoner Brian Davis, whose selfless decision to call a penalty on himself in a play-off with Jim Furyk earlier this season which cost him a maiden PGA Tour win after years of carving out a respectable living in America, surely has to be the sporting gesture of the year.

And we shouldn't forget one other Englishman who will fancy his chances of causing an upset and hoisting aloft a trophy that is normally the reserve of Americans or players from the rest of the world – and that is Malton's Simon Dyson.

His stop-start season will not have helped his preparation but with his sixth-place finish at the US PGA three years ago, Dyson has shown he has what it takes to muscle into proceedings in the final round of a major.

It was in that summer of 2007 that Padraig Harrington ended European golf's long wait for a major, going onto win two more as he showed just how much self-belief that breakthrough triumph can generate.

We have been hyping these British golfers for a long time: this could be the time they deliver and prove that our optimism has been warranted.

A VICTORY for Leyton Hewitt in Halle and a Queen's final between Americans Mardy Fish and Sam Querrey illustrate that the men's singles at this year's Wimbledon may not be as cut and dried as it has been in recent years.

The depth in the men's game has been demonstrated by events at the two big grass-court warm-up events, particularly in the shock defeats for six-time champion Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, the latter the only man to have defeated the Swiss since his first title in 2003 at Wimbeldon.

The two created their own duopoly at the All England Club in three successive finals from 2006-2008, a sequence that was only broken by Nadal's absence from the championships last year through injury.

Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic have struggled of late but remain capable of winning the tournament, as does last year's finalist Andy Roddick.

With that tremendous battler Hewitt back in form, along with the previously-unheralded American duo of Fish and Querrey, plus the likes of Maran Cilic, Nikolay Davydenko and Feliciano Lopez, we could be in for an exciting fortnight.

and another thing...

RAISE a glass – of beer not bubbly – for Ian Hutchinson, the Yorkshire motorcycle rider who rewrote the history books at the Isle of Man TT last week.

Hutchinson, of Bingley, became the first man in the 103-year history of the meeting to win five races in one week, a phenomenal achievement given the variation in classes and bikes he was riding.

The Isle of Man TT has struggled reputation-wise in recent years, with death tolls taking the headlines.

More lives were claimed last week, and should not be forgotten.

But Hutchinson has enabled the TT to annex headlines about daredevil riding, on-the-edge speeds and outstanding performances which the famous institution deserves.

His acknowledgement of that achievement was typical of the camaraderie of a sport where danger and death are just around the corner.

He invited all his support team, and even his rivals, to join him in a pint of lager, or several, to celebrate.