Sport Jim White
NEVER BEFORE in the history of British team sport can so much have been owed to just one man. At the end of November, Great Britain take part in the final of the Davis Cup for the first time since 1978. And the reason the British are in with a chance of landing the international tennis competition is entirely down to the spirit, attitude and prowess of Andy Murray. Murray has driven his nation to the very lip of world domination through a quite extraordinary demonstration of will.
Because let’s face it, this is not a country in thrall to the game. Our relationship with tennis is largely restricted to two weeks every summer when we host the world’s finest tournament. At Wimbledon fortnight we applaud politely as the spoils are taken away by a succession of graceful middle European men and identikit eastern European women with surnames ending in ‘ova’. Invariably, the only hint of local interest in the latter stages of the fortnight comes from watching Andy in action. Unless his brother Jamie does well in the doubles.
So lacking in depth is tennis here that for decades we have stared at a replica of the Davis Cup grand trophy displayed in the Wimbledon museum, and assumed that like all the silverware thereabouts, the original belonged abroad. Murray, too, must have passed by on his way to practise on the outer courts and wondered at the trophy’s status and meaning, and why he was born in a tennis backwater.
But unlike the rest of us, Murray decided to do something about his country’s woeful standing in the tennis equivalent of a world cup, the competition in which 126 nations currently take up their racquets. When he first got involved, the British team were playing in the Europe/ Africa Group Two, the Davis Cup equivalent of the Vauxhall Conference. There they encountered countries like Madagascar, Belarus and Moldova. The painful truth was it was about our level.
Murray, though, was having none of that. Despite the fact that the rest of the British team was made up of the hapless and the hopeless, he did not shirk from national service. When Davis Cup duty came around, he committed himself to it whole-heartedly, flung himself into the fray with a fearsome, square-mouthed howl of determination. And, gradually, he dragged his country up the rankings.
Cup ties go like this: there are four singles matches and one doubles, a best of five with a simple, winner-takes-all conclusion. Each nation is obliged to field two players in the singles, one of whom can also play in the doubles. With Murray inevitably winning both his singles matches, before joining his brother to win the doubles, it didn’t really matter that whoever else made up the team was a defeat waiting to happen. In 2011, his efforts earned Britain promotion out of Europe/africa Group Two into Group One. In 2013, he dragged us kicking and screaming through a play-off into the World Group, the Premier League of tennis. And this year, winning every single match in which he has participated, he has carried us past the USA, France and Australia into the final. And when James Ward beat John Isner of the USA in the first knock-out round earlier this year, his victory was the only one achieved in five seasons by a GB player who did not bear the surname Murray.
Murray is always there, chivvying his team mates, cheering on their efforts, subsuming his ego into the communal spirit. His reaction when Ward astonished the world in winning a match was not that of a man moaning that it was about time. He looked thrilled.
So it is that through his efforts, GB face Belgium in the final with the opportunity to lift the trophy for the first time since Fred Perry and his team did so in 1936. Seventy-nine years of tennis hurt could be about to end. And if it does, we all know whom to thank.