CRUCIAL SUMMER FOR MURRAY

ANDY MURRAY marks a significant milestone today but as Scotland’s greatest sportsman celebrates turning 30 his career appears in serious danger of drifting into the tramlines.

Ivan Lendl has already been summoned and will make his way across the pond later this week like Pulp Fiction’s Winston Wolf in the hope of fixing the mess that Murray has been getting himself into since the season began.

Searching for form and with a nagging doubt over a worrisome right elbow – which has sucked the venom from his first serve – Murray appears to be in an alarmingly vulnerable state as the world No.1 prepares to enter the biggest few weeks of the tennis calender.

Thursday’s defeat at the Madrid Masters to lucky loser Borna Coric – a rank outsider who was only meant to be making up the numbers after failing to qualify – was the latest in a line of setbacks Murray has suffered since he crashed out of the Australian Open to another no-hoper, German Mischa Zverev, in the fourth round.

A hugely disappointing year is on the verge of becoming a catastrophic one for Murray.

What happens now, in next month’s French Open and at Wimbledon soon after, may well provide the next defining moments of Murray’s narrative.

Either he returns to form with a glorious bang, or our country’s sporting hero may be in danger of taking this unwelcome decline and making it into something more permanent.

So maybe, after he’s blown out the candles this afternoon, Murray should also consider picking up the phone to Scotland boss Gordon Strachan for a bit of extra motivation.

Because if Murray is in danger of convincing himself that his best years are behind him then Strachan is the very man with whom he needs to have an urgent word.

“Play a bad game at 29 and it’s just a poor 90 minutes. Play another one at 30 and all of a sudden your legs have gone.”

This cliched guff drives Strachan to distraction and little wonder.

All throughout his own playing career Strachan kept meticulous charts of his own levels of fitness and performance. These records showed that he was running faster and longer at the age of 35 at Leeds United than he was in his mid twenties at Pittodrie.

His old pal Gary McAllister was clocking up very similar data as a treblewinning 38-year-old at Liverpool.

So Strachan’s well-worn brow folds into a furrow at the slightest suggestion that the peak of any sportsman’s powers cannot possibly withstand this overnight transition into a fourth decade.

At exactly this time last year Scotland captain Scott Brown was busy talking himself into an early international retirement all because he too was the other side of his Big Three O.

There was a strong theory within the Scotland camp at that time that Ronny Deila and his team of whacky sports scientists had helped push Brown into adopting this position. That they made him believe his body was faltering and no longer equipped to cope with the demands of playing more than 60 games a season.

That he was simply not able to keep clocking up miles the way he used to.

It was all nonsense of course and symptomatic of a regime which had gone horribly wrong.

The truth of the matter is many of these players were so fed up at being fed hocus pocus from Deila’s in-house medics that they would leave Lennoxtown and drive straight to consultations with their own personal physicians in search of a second opinion.

But, amid the confusion, Brown chose to bite the bullet.

Having been told so often and for so long that it was time to start winding down his career, he reluctantly stepped away from international duty last summer – his announcement coming just a few weeks after his 31st birthday and just in time for a new beginning under Brendan Rodgers.

Since then, in their own ways, both Strachan and Rodgers have removed those doubts entirely from his head.

On Saturday, June 10, the rejuvenated Brown will captain Scotland against England at Hampden, defying all the advice with which he had been previously brainwashed. There are some – a growing number in fact – who believe the recent trend towards complete and utter obsession with all things sports science to be one of

the biggest problems to beset modern-day football. That, in attempting desperately to hone the perfect physical specimen, often it is the mind which suffers most and weakens as a result.

Rather than toughen players up for the rigours of the professional game, it has made them softer and less resilient.

Brown has certainly been better off without it.

By the time the England game comes around he may well have captained his club to a domestic clean sweep, completing the domestic season without suffering one single defeat.

He has played in 53 of Celtic’s games so far this season. When he runs out to face the English he will also pick up a 53rd cap.

Coincidentally, less than 24 hours after that make-or-break World Cup clash, two men will slug it out on Parisian clay in the final of the French Open at Roland Garros.

If Murray hopes to be one of them, as he was last year when he began eating into Novak Djokovic’s sense of invincibility, then he needs to rid himself of any notion that his body is no longer able to execute the ideas or react to the instincts inside his mind.

Of course, with three Slams already under his belt Murray could hang up his racquet tomorrow and his legacy as a Scottish sporting giant will still be secure. If we ever see his likes again it won’t be any time soon.

But there is no discernible reason why this era of sporting magnificence cannot be extended by at least four or five more years and consolidated with even more of the sport’s most sought-after trophies.

Murray at 30 does not need to be nearing the end. Rather, this ought to be the beginning of a whole new chapter of Dunblane-built dominance.

But he doesn’t need to take my word for it, just ask Gordon Strachan.