Just like the Jean Van de Velde eight years ago, Padraig Harrington did his best to throw it away.

He did not exactly paddle in the Barry Burn with his trousers rolled up and his embarrassment hanging out for all to see.

But before he threw his arms to the heavens, hugged son Patrick and then collected the Claret Jug in the 136th Open Championship after a play-off with Sergio Garcia, he made us endure another excruciating 18th hole drama.

What is it about the 18th at Carnoustie with the power to scramble the brains of some of the world's best golfers?

Why did Harrington, leading by a shot, pump his drive down the fairway only for the ball to bounce along the bridge and plop into the river which swirls across the fairway?

Why, after taking his drop, did he then deposit his next shot into the same greenside burn as Van de Velde to take a double bogey six?

And why then, with the gates opened to greatness, did Garcia find the green-side bunker and take a bogey of his own when a par would have seen his own name engraved on that precious silver jug?

Adrenaline? Nerves? Pressure?

Perhaps a combination of all three, but, to be sure - as Harrington might have said - they were moments of madness.

"If I'd lost I don't know whether I would have played golf again," Harrington said and there could have been no greater gauge of what was at stake.

Yet before we analyse Harrington's achievement as the first European to win a major championship in eight years let's hear it for Carnoustie.

The 136th Open might have been subdued in the first three days. There may have been moans about the weather, concerns about the smallish galleries and general disquiet about the isolated venue.

But when it needed to put on its Sunday best it did so quite brilliantly.

What a wonderful, exhilarating, frantic, topsy-turvy, thoroughly unbelievable final day Carnoustie supplied.

A final afternoon full of twists and turns.

One in which Garcia squandered a three-stroke lead, in which Argentina's Andres Romero played golf which defied the laws of physics and in which Harrington came with a charge which, for sheer relentlessness, would have matched the Light Brigade.

But when Harrington finally lifted that Claret Jug, after a four-hole play-off which was only a smidgen less dramatic than what went before, one question hung in the air.

Could he be the standard bearer, a pied piper to lead the generation of European young guns who so far have struggled in major tournaments?

A man to do what Nick Faldo and Sandy Lyle and Ian Woosnam did in the 80s and 90s?

At 35 there is no doubt he is a man in his prime and no doubts, too, that in Harrington - a man of great char - European golf could have no finer ambassador.

Yet you had to feel for Garcia. He had given so much to this tournament. He had led it for three days.

He had displayed charisma and maturity and touches of pure genius. He had told the reporter who questioned whether his disintegration in the last group with Tiger Woods last year might go through his mind at the start of the final round: "Don't ask that question."

The truth, however, is that the seed of doubt was buried deep inside his senses.

And when the pressure told on a final day in which the groundsmen were required to bale out bunkers as the rain fell in stair rods that seed grew into a great oak tree of doubt.

The belly putter to which he had turned for confidence and which had served him so well failed him when he needed it most.

He racked up five bogeys in regular play, mostly because of his inability to sink putts from mid-range and while he did manage three birdies his two-over-par 73 was easily his worst of the week.

And when the play-off came, in truth he had no more to give. His body was weary, his mind frayed from days of taking to his sleep with the burden of leadership.

It would be a shame, however, if his final round twitches were to deprive Garcia of his rightful place, succeeding his countryman, the retired Seve Ballesteros, as the most charismatic and successful European golfer of his generation.

True, he did not leave the course sobbing on his mother's shoulder as he did in 1999 after shooting 89 and 83. Nor should he have done because all week he had been acclaimed by the Carnoustie galleries as if he were an honorary Scot.

The famous jug, however, belongs to Ireland. To a Dubliner with twinkling eyes who took his 'lost at sea' disappointment at the 18th with wonderful good humour as he lifted son Patrick above his shoulders as if to say there are things more precious than a golfing major.

Now, however, he has it all.