Andy’s ace

Who will you cheer for if Andy Murray meets Roger Federer at Wimbledon? It’s not a straightforward question, at least not for the English. The loveliness of Rodge and the awkwardness of Andy — however British — makes for a difficult and revealing choice.

Different if you happen to be Scottish. I remember a conversation in the gents at Melbourne in 2010. Two Scots, companionably pissing side by side, were loudly discussing the final of the Australian Open just completed. An Englishwoman alongside them in the stands had been cheering Federer, the straight-sets winner, rather than Murray. ‘She was everything I was brought up to hate.’

But Murray was never an inevitable cheer-target for the English. There’s always been something difficult about him. Even during his early appearances as a boy with barbed-wire hair, the problem wasn’t that he was a teenager or that he was Scottish. These were just symptoms. The real problem was Murray himself: uncompromising, challenging and indigestible.

Right at the start he turned his back on the Lawn Tennis Association and a conventional tennis apprenticeship. Just not challenging enough. So at the age of 14, he took himself off to Spain to learn how to play tennis and how to rely on himself. If all it takes to improve is work and pain and loneliness and deprivation, then you take it, don’t you?

One of the most memorable things he did in his early appearances on the senior tour was to vomit on court. It was a message for us all: the boy before us won’t compromise — not in pursuit of the great prizes and not in anything else either. He’ll give the lot. More than you’re actually comfortable with.

I liked that.