Patrick COLLINS Stop this hurry to write off Murray
SO, farewell Andy Murray. It was good while it lasted, but nothing lasts forever. You may be the current Olympic champion, even the reigning Wimbledon champion, until today at least. But you have won nothing all year, you are 27 years old and the shades of night are falling fast.
British tennis expects rather more from its heroes than a string of nearmisses and might-have-beens. The old guard is changing, time to move aside. Or so we were told.
The reaction to Murray’s defeat in the Wimbledon quarter-finals carried the whiff of an epitaph. He had not merely lost a tennis match, he had disappointed his public, he had let the country down. Worse, he hadn’t behaved terribly well.
It was reported that the court-side photographers — innocent folk who are strangers to profanity — apparently heard him yell: ‘Shut the f*** up!’ in the direction of his box.
The same delicate souls also claimed to have heard him shout: “Five minutes before the f*****g match!’, when he was standing beneath the Royal Box, which was occupied at the time by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. My dear, the shock! And the shame!
Now nobody is justifying the cavalier use of industrial language, but the presence of royalty seems wholly irrelevant.
William experienced seven-anda-half years of full-time military service, while Kate is a graduate of the University of St Andrews. It is just possible that they may have heard the charmless term a time or two before. No matter. Murray is the week’s designated whipping boy, and as such he could expect no mercy.
In fact, he behaved with genuine dignity in the aftermath of his loss.
He paid handsome tribute to his conqueror, Grigor Dimitrov: ‘He was the better player from start to finish.’ He conceded his own shortcomings: ‘I need to make some improvements to my game.’
He spoke of the need to ‘work harder, get stronger and become physically better’.
And he offered this philosophical reflection: ‘You can have bad days as an athlete. You don’t win all the time. Sometimes, you just have to take it on the chin and move on.’
He could not have expressed himself more eloquently.
And he spoke as an authentic achiever. Murray was the first British man in 77 years to win the singles title. He had won 23 of his previous 24 matches at Wimbledon, his single defeat being inflicted by Roger Federer. He is ranked five in the world, while the next-best Briton is ranked 143rd.
The state of British women’s tennis is almost equally dire. They are the poor bloody infantry; natural victims for whom the second week of a Grand Slam tournament is a distant dream. At this level, Murray is our only player, certainly our only star.
And he carries the burden pretty well. He faces the questions, tells his tale and asks to be judged by his performance on court. He is not the most avid attention-seeker in his sport; indeed, he may not be the most avid in his own family. But he goes about his work with scrupulous diligence, he wins with grace and loses without recourse to trite excuse.
He comes across as a serious man who has emerged into impressive maturity from a faintly gauche adolescence.
Yet still he is not fully accepted. He is too intense, too chippy, simply too Scottish for the Home Counties crowd which sits in judgment on such matters. There is a suspicion that Wimbledon has never really forgiven him for not being Tim Henman. In fact, Henman’s verdict on Murray was a model of fairness and concision: ‘There’s not much to analyse’, he said. ‘Andy didn’t play well and his opponent took full advantage.’
But of course, we can’t leave it there. And so we hear that he surrendered rather too easily; that he might have pushed himself a little more vigorously; that he should have worked harder to retain his grip on the title.
All this to the greatest tennis player that Britain has ever produced — and we must discount Fred Perry’s remarkable record on the grounds that he was playing a different sport with different equipment at a quite different pace.
Murray is a towering example of what may be achieved by a combination of immense natural talent and ferocious dedication. After generations of pointless poseurs who imagined that being No 1 in these islands represented the end of the rainbow, Murray taught us to reject the mundane, to raise our sights, to believe in better.
Yet despite all this, he is fatuously chastised, pushed aside long before his time. And all on account of a single defeat to an urgently emerging talent.
I sense there is unfairness verging on injustice at work here, for the young man is possessed of a talent which British tennis scarcely recognises or deserves.
Reports of Andy Murray’s professional demise have been pitifully exaggerated. Soon it will be time to revel in his rebirth.