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condividiMurray, young light in the sunset
British No 1 is the one left standing after an epic five-set battle with young French gunslinger Richard Gasquet. Simon Barnes
These plucky Brits, they never make it easy for us. Andy Murray took on the job of putting the nation through the emotional wringer by moving to the very edge of disaster before staging a comeback of such a demented and inspirational nature that you would have thought that the old King of the Hill was back among us again. Murray took his game to a level of intensity we have never seen from him before.
He took on Richard Gasquet, the Frenchman, yesterday and Gasquet at one point was serving for the match. It would have been a straight-sets victory and it would have been well merited; a player who, at all stages, had seemed ever so slightly stronger, and in grass-court tennis little things go a very long way. How did it turn around? Was it the crowd that lifted Murray? Was it Murray's desperate defiance that inspired the crowd to play their best game?
The result was a glorious symbiosis and the two partners gave us one of the great teatime excesses that have been part of the British summer since Tim Henman first found that a British player on Centre Court can find things within himself that are unobtainable elsewhere. A genuinely remarkable match ended up 5-7, 3-6, 7-6, 6-2, 6-4 in Murray's favour and, with this result, the Scot has truly arrived as a top-quality player. He showed fight and passion - and at the end, an impossible coolness - and thoroughly deserves his victory in a genuine Wimbledon epic.
It comes down to the minutest differentials. And there really aren't all that many: Gasquet, at 22, is a year older and, at No10, one place higher in the world rankings. Both are talented ball-players, ambitious, eager and at times breathtaking to watch. They can both construct some fabulous points, both can turn defence into attack with a sudden twist of the imagination. Right from the first, this looked a good one. Neither of these players has yet made it to the topmost bananas, although Gasquet is slightly better off in this department: he reached the semi-finals here last year, when he had the misfortune to meet Roger Federer.
Murray and Gasquet went toe-to-toe in the first set, 11 games and no breaks, and just as we were wondering who would have the edge in the tie-break, the smallest, tiniest thing went amiss, and that has made all the difference. Murray made a couple of errors on groundstrokes to go 30-15 down on his serve. And then - it hardly seems fair to write it down, perhaps I should keep it to myself - he missed his first serve and then put the second into the net at 69mph.
It was an attacks of the yips, nothing less, odd to recount in a player whose strength of nerve we have always admired, not least after yesterday's goings-on. And of course, he clambered straight back into the game, saving a series of set points, but never quite wrapping up the service game. The reason he failed to do so wasn't lack of will or fight or ability, it was because he wasn't getting enough first serves in and his second serve consistently gave Gasquet a chance.
So there was the first set, there was the momentum and there was Murray struggling. The manner in which a player struggles is deeply indicative of his nature and Murray believes that when in doubt, you go to the drop shot. As a point of information, when Murray is not in doubt it is because he has already played a drop shot. It is his default mechanism and it has been criticised by people in their legions. Make a note: Murray's default mechanism is stubbornness.
So when he served for the first time in the second set, two successive muffed drop shots opened the way and then a wince-making double fault handed Gasquet a break point. As a result, he took the game and then the set. A couple of bad points, that's all it took; a couple of bad serves. Why should the second serve break down at these points of all points? Work it out for yourself.
It looked all over, it really did. Gasquet served for the match and that's when Murray extraordinary revival began. Had you forgotten how stubborn he is? Increasingly, he had been relishing the struggle and soon he began to thrive on it. Murray and the crowd got working and together they put the worm of doubt into Gasquet's mind. And lo and behold, a momentum shift took place.
It was glorious stuff, the stuff that brings us back to this tournament year after year: Murray came back from a break down to win a sensational tie-break, winning a decisive rally despite playing a drop shot that did not work out and sealing it with a running backhand that took him into the photographers' pit. It was wild stuff of pure inspiration, crowd and player sharing the same frenzy. If Murray had played naked and covered in woad, he could hardly have given a more atavistic performance.
And then another mood swing: Murray calm, Murray in control, Murray going a break up. Gasquet looked rattled; a man he had more or less beaten, a man he had more or less outplayed, was now outplaying him. Murray took the fourth set, with a double break, and we were off into the fifth.
The light began to fade, but the tennis did not. Every point the players played as if for their lives, both players coming up with points that you simply cannot play in a normal state of consciousness. Murray, stone blind in the glorious nature of sport, somehow stormed off a service break in the first game, flirted with a break on his own serve and then, with a magnificent reassertion of his own will, managed to cling on. It was now Murray's to lose as the sun went down, finding aces, relishing in the new revelation of himself to himself. For the first time, he looked like a man of destiny.
Simon Barnes
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