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There is very good episode of the sitcom The Thick Of It, in which Andy Murray is asked to front up a doomed government information campaign called Healthy Choices. Murray doesn’t actually appear in person at any point, but this doesn’t stop him
being described as, among other things, “a nice Scotch person”, “a very boring man with tight white shorts” and “Andy Pandy glamor Gandhi having a hand shandy”, eventually departing from the wings to cries of “Andy Murray’s Henman-fisting us in the press!”.
Six years ago when the show was made, part of the comedy seemed to lie in the casting of its absent sporting-celebrity glad-hander. There was something perfectly pitched about the idea of trying to goad this particular wry, angular world-class sportsman into becoming a public role model, an athlete who, for all his success and obvious decency, tended to resemble in his appearances in front of the TV cameras a very intelligent alpaca startled to discover it has the gift of human speech, and experimenting, gloomily, with a few basic sentences.
Which just goes to show how wrong you can be. The fact is beneath the public po-face, Murray has always been one of the more wryly charming sports people you’re likely to meet. In his maturity he now looks like something more: a wonderfully intelligent athlete, a supreme example of how best to exploit fully the outer fringes of your own talent – and, yes, a perfect sporting role model in more ways than one.
Murray may or may not win a third major title in Melbourne on Sunday. Novak Djokovic, his opponent in the Australian Open final, is the world No1 and has dropped only five sets since last September, and two of those were in the Serb’s semi-final against Stanislas Wawrinka. And yet at the end of his victory against Tomas Berdych on Thursday, as Murray hopped around hurling sweatbands into the crowd, it was hard to avoid the feeling that it doesn’t really matter what happens to him from here, that it is achievement enough for now simply to reach a first major final since the back surgery and chronic ankle pain of 2013.
Murray has by all accounts been a wonderful presence in Melbourne these last two weeks. Not just in his movement and shot-making, but also in his grace and good temper: the generous, unaffected speech after his quarter-final defeat of Nick Kyrgios; and the presence behind him of that happy family gallery, which just happens to contain, entirely on merit, a high-class female coach.
It is, though, on court that Murray’s model qualities show through. In particular the first set of the match against Berdych should be edited down, set to stirring music and handed out as a lesson for every aspirant sports person, or indeed anybody with any interest in how to win at things generally. Here was evidence in a single losing set of Murray’s thrillingly tenacious competitive intelligence, a false start during which he effectively taught himself how he was going to win against this opponent on that day on that court.
In a sense this was Murray’s career in miniature, a player whose game has always seemed to be about applying his brain to some apparent disadvantage, whether a lack of real pummelling power, or the need to develop, with slice and accuracy, a genuine A-lister’s serve. With Berdych leading 5-3 in that first set Murray began to hit deep, testing the outer limits of his opponent’s forehand, feeling for tender points. His returns suddenly upped a gear as his opponent’s serve came into focus. Berdych was being “solved”, a process applied, snags untangled, a kind of sporting homoeopathy whereby Murray taught himself to win while losing just a little.
“Good play Tomas”, Berdych muttered as he flopped across the line to take the first set. Murray, jogging back hungrily, looked incredulous. Can’t you see what’s going on here, he seemed to be saying. Within 10 minutes he was 4-0 up in the second set, en route to effectively killing the match.
It was in its own way a perfect little sporting parable in miniature, an example of how to interpret and learn from experience. Not to mention further evidence that Murry is often so immersed in the mechanics of his sport he seems almost unaware of the score, each point and each shot a component part of some wider education, the single ever-evolving game of professional tennis he’s been playing now for the last 10 years.And in the end this is where Murray provides such a brilliantly instructive example. The in-game intelligence, the problem-solving, the applied academics of it all is exactly what British sports people so often fail at. Tennis isn’t alone in this country in producing talented young players who seem simply to stop, to become sated, incurious. Criticism of the Premier League academy system is often much the same: an absence of raggedness, leaders, learners, too much waiting to be told. This week I heard a county cricket coach talk about how one current, and very talented, young English batsman had scored too many hundreds at the lower levels for his own good, that his county should have “programmed some failure” into his development by hurling him in a level too high, forcing him to think a little, to cope with “humps in the road”.
This is Murray’s game all over. Just ask Berdych, who had the peculiar experience of serving at set point to an opponent grinning broadly at the other end, brain whirring, possibilities flashing behind his eyes. Sunday’s final against Djokovic is of course another matter altogether, but Murray has made his point. He remains a supreme example of how to wring the most out of a hard-honed talent, a generously rare bird in British sport and, perhaps against some expectations, a very interesting man in black shorts.
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