It takes a lot to admit that I am the one who had to grow up regarding the young Scottish tennis player Andy Murray. You know the one: that Scottish bloke who said he would want “anyone but England” to win in the World Cup. I didn’t like him because of that. Well, you wouldn’t would you? He was, after all, 19 years of age and he must have been the first 19 year old in history who said something like that. And not only did he say “anyone but England”, he added “Ha ha” afterwards. I mean: that’s taking the piss isn’t it?
You know what? I held that against him for years. How dare he made a joke about a Scot supporting anyone but England? On that basis, I’d support anyone but Murray from then on. What an idiot. Me, not him.
My anti-Murray stance was not helped by watching England lose to Germany in the 1990 World Cup, in a hotel room full of Scots who raucously cheered every German penalty as England made their usual exit from the tournament. The chip-on-the-shoulder attitude of my Scots friends, whose schadenfreude was such that I assumed it was a Scottish word, left me somewhat scarred and I began to want Scotland to lose, just as they wanted England to lose. Two wrongs somehow making a right. And when Andy Murray came along, saying that he wanted “anyone but England” to win, well that was it for me. How grown up some of us aren’t!
Murray hates England so much that he lives there. Not only does he live there, he has a lot of English people in his entourage. In fact, he loathes the country to the extent that he married an English girl. And he plays tennis for Great Britain in the Davis Cup.
This weekend, Andy Murray was Great Britain. He played three matches for the GB team, including the doubles with his brother, and won them all. Today, in beating Gilles Simon, his third game in three days, he looked knackered, but he had a huge desire to win the tie for Britain, generously praising the rest of the team to the extent that he might as well have not been there. Be honest: if Andy Murray hadn’t been there, GB wouldn’t have won a match. But he was there and once he won, he walked across the court draped in the Union Flag.
Now, I love the bloke. I’m embarrassed that I didn’t want him to win because he was Scottish because I rather missed the point. I fell foul of the media shit that he was an England hater, a kind of tennis-playing Alex Salmond. The truth is that Murray is much loved by Da Yoof who are not interested in all the Scots/English nonsense. He’s a wonderful world class player who has done what no other Brit has done since Fred Perry. He’s a good lad too, who does an awful lot of good work away from tennis which never makes the media. And he’s the best British/Scottish player of my lifetime.
In these days of easy honours for political apparatchiks and dubious TV “personalities” of dubious talents, Sir Andy must be just around the corner. He’d probably hate it, but he bloody well deserves it for all he has achieved in his life and his career.
