Davis Cup final 2015: Why Andy Murray is the greatest of all Britain’s sportsmen
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Your support makes all the difference.The setting, a featureless exhibition hall on the edge of Ghent, is surreal but the scenario is as familiar as the snags in a favourite Arran sweater. Once again, a fractured family of home nations turn their lonely eyes to Andy Murray, a political anomaly made flesh.
Should Murray win the Davis Cup on Sunday afternoon by defeating David Goffin, a Belgian tennis player who is barely a household name in his hometown of Rocourt, Liège, his status as Her Britannic Majesty’s greatest-ever athlete is surely secure.
That’s a big call, given that lawn tennis is as culturally incompatible with certain parts of the United Kingdom as deck quoits and elephant polo, but it bears scrutiny since, despite the imperfections of his case, no British individual has had a greater impact on his or her sport.
His day job, discovering a way to break the global dominance of Novak Djokovic, is likely to remain incomplete. The Serbian is, at 28, a week younger, and has atomised opposition so that a Big Four that also includes Murray, Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal has been reduced to The Man, The Big Dog, The One.
This Davis Cup final has gladiatorial aspects, even if it veers closer in spirit to pantomime than mortal combat. It underscores the notion of tennis as muscular chess, since it gives Murray, the world No 2, the scope to move his opponents around the drop-in clay court as if they are a child’s toy on the end of a string.
Yet it is bafflingly, banally, British to the core. It is being played in an atmosphere of reckless abandon and emotional incontinence redolent of a boy band reunion concert in Butlin’s, or a CBeebies roadshow starring Peppa Pig.
If you ever wondered about the ensuing spectacle if the Chipping Norton Women’s Institute somehow inhaled amyl nitrate at the Harvest Festival, wonder no more. Just scan the British fans in Ghent, and marvel at a capacity with glitter that generations of Blue Peter presenters failed to grasp.
It is easy to scoff – guilty m’lud, and I ask for an annual case of All England club cynicism to be taken into consideration – but at least the clichéd jibe that Murray is British when he wins and Scottish when he loses has been put to bed.
If this was about geography, tennis’ World Cup final would be billed as A Nuclear Family from Dunblane against Belgium. The debt British tennis owes the Murray clan was writ large in Saturday’s pivotal doubles, when the Belgians blinked first by simply selecting their best two singles players, Goffin and Steve Darcis.
It did not need the superficiality of the stylised fist pumping, high fiving and behind-the-hand plotting. That much was clear when Andy skipped off court, with the freedom of a child in a school playground, when the brothers broke the Belgians to win the first set.
Filial synchronicity was tested to the limit by the loss of the second set, and the recovery from a break down in the third. The trophy itself might belong on Antiques Roadshow, but the tennis was urgent, coruscating and utterly compelling.
Should the younger and more celebrated Murray brother close the deal by inflicting another defeat on Goffin, the world No 16, prepare to dust off the history books, broaden the debate, and leave preconceptions in the locked cupboard of your subconscious. He deserves that privilege at least.
Let’s first address Murray’s chosen sport, which is deceptively, ruthlessly elitist. If we are to take his world ranking at face value, his direct equivalent in football would be Cristiano Ronaldo. In rugby union he would be Dan Carter to Djokovic’s Richie McCaw.
Then widen the challenge, to include his predecessors in British sport. Should Murray win the Davis Cup single-handedly, after beating the other Grand Slam Nations, Australia, the US and France on the way to the final, he will push the Boys of ’66 further into the mists of history.
The diversity of football’s folk heroes, from Bobby Charlton to Bobby Robson, and George Best through to Gazza, hints at the national game’s raw emotional power, which is too often diffused by a desire to judge on personality rather than enduring achievement. Murray has a special selflessness, a rare and reassuring rigour traditionally found in such Olympians as Chris Hoy and Steve Redgrave.
Fellow Scots Jim Clark and Jackie Stewart were products of a golden age in motorsport but they are distant figures when Formula One is defined by the dilettante it has installed as world champion, Lewis Hamilton. Murray performs with an intensity only Nigel Mansell has matched behind the wheel.
Martin Johnson is, for my money, a towering figure in modern English rugby, but he was subsequently diminished as national team manager because players did not buy into his authority, or the substance he represented.
Similarly Sebastian Coe, the most compelling and aesthetically pleasing British athlete in modern times, has been compromised by his post-competitive career, which, during his brief and dismal tenure as president of the IAAF, has focused on his flaws.
Murray, like Coe, has an Everyman’s background, being ferried across the border in a minibus as a child to find suitable competition in England. But he has none of the quasi-politician’s insufferable arrogance, a trait which undermined the reputation of another single-minded champion, Nick Faldo.
Murray will be remembered for those freeze frame images of a sunny day on Centre Court in 2013, when he became Wimbledon champion a year after being installed as Olympic champion in the same setting.
Yet the Davis Cup has the alchemy of the Ryder Cup, which makes agnostic Europeans cheer for a continent they are conditioned to distrust. It is where men rise above themselves and consume entire nations. Think of John McEnroe, dragging his US team kicking and screaming into the hall of fame, and then consider Andrew Barron Murray.
If you have a pulse you will ignore the siren call of the Premier League and the tiresome diversion of Jose Mourinho’s ego today. You will make use of free-to-air TV, mentally replace Wimbledon’s strawberries and cream with moules and mayo-frosted frites, and emit this bat’s squeak of desire:
Go Andy, Go.
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