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Roger Alton

Wednesday, 2nd July 2008

Mighty Murray

If Gordon Brown really wants to make people start liking him, he could do a lot worse than turn to whoever’s giving mighty Andy Murray some advice these days. For what was obvious in that stunning, thrilling, epic, heart-pumping comeback to beat France’s Richard Gasquet in what was basically a night match on the Centre Court is that the great Scot has turned himself into a thorough crowd-pleaser. Later, munching sushi and taking a call from Tim Henman while talking engagingly about the match in a live radio interview, he must have won over millions more.

Which brings me to the real Wimbledon highlight, possibly a sporting moment of the year, when the feisty if unpronounceable Russian, Ally Kudryavtseva, revealed that the reason she beat the terminally annoying Maria Sharapova was because she didn’t like her clothes. Fair enough; who does? And it’s good to see that one of the most noble of all instincts in school sport — to put one over the bastard with the better kit — survives well into adulthood.

Though quite what this new dimension to elite sporting competition means for Roger Federer’s appalling cardigan is anybody’s guess. Let’s hope it’s not the death of him. But what might happen if he loses, unthinkably perhaps but not inconceivably, in the final, could be very interesting. Will he make as rapid an exit as Bjorn Borg in 1981 when he lost to John McEnroe at Wimbledon and the US Open and immediately disappeared into a rather dark world of dodgy business ventures, girls and heaven knows what? And McEnroe himself has said that once Borg quit, a lot of the point had gone and he left top-level tennis soon after.

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