Just after Andy Murray made the winning pass that won him Wimbledon for the first time in 2013, he looked up to the sky in pain. Not laughing with joy as Djokovic does when he wins a slam or weeping graciously as Federer did before he quietly put on his Rolex, but a sheer plea of existential pain. And wasn’t pain what Andy Murray was really all about? The emotional pain of the press conferences where he could barely conceal his dislike for the journalists, the pain of a nation’s expectation on his shoulders, and, latterly, the endless physical pain that he spoke of so often.

His audience knew his pain too. In fact, I think they enjoyed it

Barely a Wimbledon has passed in the last ten years when I haven’t opened a newspaper to see a feature on Murray, grimacing in a photo studio, the article detailing the endless problems his hips sustained from his particular style of baseline tennis. Yesterday, as he made his eleventh-hour announcement that he wouldn’t be playing in the Wimbledon men’s singles after all, it........

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