Nick Price

There are some exciting prospects who have emerged this year. Branden Grace and Hiroyuki Fujita have had great years in Europe and Japan, Bae Sang-moon is a talent and John Senden is a model of consistency who just missed out on the team in 2011.

Exactly. Unfortunately, a lot of the guys you would think would be key members haven’t played well this year. Louis [Oosthuizen] has played well, Adam [Scott] has played well, Ernie [Els] has had a good year but then you start getting down to people like Charl Schwartzel. Charl’s played poorly by his standards this year, so has Geoff Ogilvy.

KJ [Choi] has been hot and cold and Jason [Day] hasn’t had a very strong year – I’m sure he’d be the first to admit that after what he did in 2011.

I’m sure three or four of those guys are going to play well over the next few months which will be important as I would like to have the majority of our players having played at least one Presidents Cup. I don’t want half the team to be rookies, although their enthusiasm is always great and I don’t want to put that in a negative light

I think I really need eight ‘veterans’. You can deal with four rookies but to deal with six would be really hard. I don’t want to pre-empt what I might do but if I have a high percentage of rookies that are going to make the team, I may have to look to veterans for my two captain’s picks. It will be an interesting thing. It’s certainly keeping me on my toes.

Have you spoken to Norman to get his views and insights into the playing group?

I haven’t but he sent me a really nice email after I was announced as captain wishing me the best of luck. I’m sure that I’ll get to talk to him at some point over the next three or four months but, I don’t want to sound negative about it, for me it’s more about my association with the players as opposed to looking at the past.

I think he and I have been around the block enough to know a lot about the game and have our ideas of doing it [the captaincy] our own way.