Tiger Woods' influence paid off for captain Davis Love as the United States took a three-point lead into the final day of the Ryder Cup.

The 14-time major winner has kept a relatively low profile, considering his stature in the game, but stepped in when there was a question over whether Jordan Spieth and Patrick Reed should be retained for the Saturday afternoon fourballs.

Love was considering whether to give his top two players a rest to avoid them having to play all five sessions but Woods was insistent.

“We all kind of had a little bit (of a) different idea — even my son threw a line-up out and he’s my cart driver,” said Love, whose side lead 9 1/2 6 1/2.

“Obviously Tiger’s watched the same guys play all week so I finally just said to Tiger ‘are we playing them or are we sitting them?’

“He said ‘No, you have to send them back out there, they are playing so well’.”

Love went with Woods — and Reed and Spieth responded with a 2&1 victory over Europe's most consistent pairing of Justin Rose and Henrik Stenson.

The US captain will send Reed and Spieth out first and second on Sunday to face Rory McIlroy, Europe’s best player of week, and Stenson, respectively.

“I’ve obviously been around a lot of teams and it was no secret they were going to load the boat,” added Love.

“So our problem, again, was do we say ‘all right, we’re going to put the six guys out (first) that are playing really well.

“Well, we’ve got 12 that are playing really well, so we didn’t know what to do.

"Look at Dustin Johnson at nine, he made a pile of birdies today, just his record might not look as good.

“But we had guys that wanted to get going, guys that wanted a little more time, guys that wanted to play close to each other.

“We got what we expected from Darren and I’m sure he didn’t expect anything different from us.”