The Northern Irish golfer and his team-mates overcame a hostile atmosphere at Bethpage Black to claim Ryder Cup glory but McIlroy felt that the US captain should have tried to calm fans down after he was subjected to vicious abuse.

Speaking on the Stick to Football podcast, the five-time major champion said: "Keegan Bradley and I have talked about this. You have to play into the home field advantage, absolutely.

"But during the competition on Friday night and Saturday night, after the stuff that we heard on the course, there was an opportunity for either Keegan or some of the team-mates to be like: 'Let's just calm down here. Let's try to play this match in the right spirit.'

"Some of them did that, but obviously Keegan had the biggest platform of the week in being the captain. I feel like he could have said something on that Friday or Saturday night, and he didn't."

However, McIlroy felt that the atmosphere had calmed slightly on the final day.

He said: "But in fairness, Sunday was a little bit better. It seemed like the rhetoric was sort of calmed down a bit.

"In the Ryder Cup for the first two days, there's 50,000 people on four holes. It's so tight and so packed in and so condensed. Then on Sunday there's 12 matches, so the crowd is a little more dispersed around the golf course. It doesn't really get into that mob mentality as much."

McIlroy played in his eighth consecutive Ryder Cup for Europe last year and considers it to be his most memorable experience at the iconic team event.

The world number two said: "I would say winning as a team has a very different feeling to winning as an individual. You can celebrate it more.

"I've always said individual wins in my career are always going to be the proudest things that I've achieved or what I'm proudest of, but I've never had as much fun in my career as I've had at the Ryder Cup.

"That was my eighth Ryder Cup and it was definitely the best one by far."