While the Ryder Cup captaincy is usually offered to a player whose best days are behind him, there are no regulations laid down by either the PGA of America or the European Tour which state that the captain must adopt a non-playing role. And judging by his recent comments, Lehman sees himself leading by example at the K Club.

"I've done a lot of work to prepare myself for this year and I feel like it's already paying off, " he said at the Accenture World Match Play. "I really don't see any reason why I can't continue to improve and why I can't have a legitimate shot at making the team. I don't see why that's not possible."

Yet, his ambition flies in the face of both precedent and common sense. You have to trawl back to Arnold Palmer at East Lake in 1963 to find the last time that anyone thought that doubling up as a player and a captain was feasible. Even Jack Nicklaus chose to remain in the dugout in 1987, and he had won the Masters a year earlier.

Bernhard Langer, who led Europe to such a crushing victory at Oakland Hills, not surprisingly believes that Lehman is wildly underestimating the demands of wearing two hats at such a pressurised event. "It's just too much to do. There's no way with the Ryder Cup as big as it is that the captain can be prepared to play. I don't think it would be a wise decision for anybody."

It could be that Lehman's self-professed determination to become the first playing captain in over 40 years is part of a mind game aimed at persuading other players to be as focused on the Ryder Cup as he is, however, evidence of late suggests otherwise.

After losing two stone in the off-season, top-10 finishes at both the Pebble Beach National Pro-Am and the Nissan Open were signs of progress for a player who hasn't won a tournament since the 2000 Phoenix Open, but he then turned heads with a series of outstanding performances on the way to reaching the semi-finals at the World Match Play.

Even if the format has a tendency to produce unpredictable results, Lehman's victories over Stuart Appleby, Adam Scott, David Toms and Chad Campbell could hardly be put down to good fortune alone. Here was someone who played six matches in five days and won four of them against highquality opposition. This wasn't just form, this was Ryder Cup form.

After several years close to the top of the world game, Lehman damaged his shoulder while playing with his children at an amusement park before the 1998 British Open at Royal Birkdale. The injury affected his flexibility and when he later had to have surgery on both knees, his career was seriously on the wane.

There were glimpses of his best last season when he had runner-up finishes at the Players Championship and the Buick Invitational, before tying for 13th place at the Masters, but nothing like the consistency he has shown of late. "The battle for me is regaining the trust in myself I had at one time, " he said.

"That's slowly coming back.

I'm not where I was, but I'm on the right track."

Whereas other captains before him have been prepared to let their own games suffer in the lead-up to the matches, Lehman doesn't see himself either as a general on a distant hill top or as someone like Hal Sutton standing beside the first tee in a cowboy hat. "I'm going to enjoy bringing the cup back, " he announced not long after his appointment, and it appears more and more that he wants to physically wrest it from Europe following the USA's humiliation at Oakland Hills.

"From a European perspective, I don't think playing and captaining is a realistic option, " says Bernard Gallacher who captained Europe three times between 1991 and '95. "No reason why Europe should change anything at the moment, but from an American perspective, I can understand why Lehman wants to play. They have got to do something different after the last two Ryder Cups, and the traditional non-playing style has clearly not been working for them. So I think he feels he can change this bad run by inspiring his teammates as a player."

While the last three USA captains, Sutton, Curtis Strange and Ben Crenshaw, were approaching the end of their careers on the PGA Tour, Gallacher believes that Lehman might now be trying to redefine the captain's role. "It's fraught with danger, but he's still a highly competitive player with a good Ryder Cup record. I felt that when we won at Oak Hill in 1995, the player the Americans were lacking for those matches was their captain Lanny Wadkins. I was so pleased that Lanny wasn't playing, and Lehman's that sort of guy as well. You'll notice there have been no calls from either the PGA of America or from the players to say he should stick to the captaincy."

Significantly, Davis Love, who has played every Ryder Cup since 1993, has endorsed Lehman's desire to lead from the front. "I think it's feasible to be a playing captain, " Love said, "and if he gets on a roll and has a couple of good majors, we want him on the team because he's a great, gritty player."

But the question remains as to what Lehman will decide to do if he qualifies by right when America's cut-off comes after the USPGA championship in August.

Unlike Sutton and Strange, whose vice-captains Steve Jones and Mike Hulbert had never even played in a Ryder Cup, Lehman has an able lieutenant in Corey Pavin.

"It's possible that Lehman feels he could hand over the responsibility to Pavin who was the best US player in the 1991 and '93 and who certainly knows what the Ryder Cup is all about, " says Gallacher. "Lehman also has Loren Roberts as another of his assistants, and he knows the players and is highly experienced, but there has to be a real danger of Lehman falling between two stools here."

With America's Ryder Cup points weighted heavily in favour of this year's events . . .

the winner of a PGA Tour event in 2006 receives five times more points than a winner last season while the total for a major victory has increased from 450 points last year to 675 . . . Lehman could slip out of contention for the team very quickly.

Yet, if he won a tournament, or put together a series of strong performances in the majors, he could well cement his place in the top 10.

"I would love to be part of it as both a captain and a player, " he said last week.

Involved in a spat with Seve Ballesteros during the singles at Oak Hill, and then embroiled in more controversy four years later, Lehman has never gone gently into the Ryder Cup. He refused to apologise for running onto the 17th green at Brookline when Justin Leonard holed a long putt in his match against Jose Maria Olazabal, and only succeeded in fanning the flames with his justification that: "Sometimes you get carried away, but the Europeans celebrated a lot at Valderrama. Today it was their turn to watch."

Before his 3 and 2 singles victory in the top match against Lee Westwood which sparked off America's dramatic comeback at Brookline, Lehman had been taken aside in the locker room by his beleaguered captain Crenshaw. "We put you in this position because we believe in you, " Crenshaw said. "I can do the job, " Lehman replied. Crenshaw insisted later that the exchange was one of his greatest moments in golf.

This time, Lehman is determined to buck the trend and do two jobs. If opinion is still divided on whether he made a mistake at Brookline, he's definitely making one now.