Can he repeat his superlative Olympic gold winning performance when he meets Djokovic this night for the Grand Slam Tittle?
Built as the centrepiece of the World’s Fair Exhibition of 1964, it could now be seen as a symbol of the universal appeal of tennis, a sport in which a Swiss, a Spaniard and a Serb have shared out the major men’s prizes for the past five years.
So what about Scotland? After the unscheduled arrival of the two Celtic knights, Sirs Connery and Ferguson, in the interview room on Saturday night, there is a sense that the tartan army is stirring.
Yes, we have seen Andy Murray reach major finals before, but his standing in the game has never been so high, nor his supporters so numerous. Dunblane already has a golden postbox; by Monday night it could be celebrating the first Grand Slam title of Murray’s brilliant career.
Murray’s triumph at the Olympic Games was a wonderful thing, but a gold medal was not the prize he would have grown up dreaming about. It was the US Open that made the first big impression on him as a junior — not least because he shot into the public eye for the first time with his victory in the 2004 boys’ tournament here. Here, at 9pm BST, he will walk out with a chance of adding the senior title to his collection.
Murray was still very young, in terms of his exposure to the tour, when he played Roger Federer here in the 2008 final. “It’s a bit of a blur now,” he said last night.
“It just felt like it came around so quickly. It was the first time I had been in the semis and final [of a Grand Slam tournament] and it just seemed to go in the blink of an eye.
“This time, I’m going to have a day to practice and rest and think about it. I am sure I will deal with it all much better this time, I’ve got four more years of experience and quite a lot of that experience has come this year, so that helps. I will give it everything, leave it all out there.”
Murray’s struggles to reach this stage have been admirable in themselves.
He hasn’t been at his most fluent, particularly in the two matches he played on Louis Armstrong Stadium — a court where he admits he has never been able to hit the high notes.
Against Feliciano Lopez in the third round, he lost more points than he won. In the quarter-final against Marin Cilic, his opponent served twice for a two-set lead, only to lose his nerve both times.
The important thing, though, is to cling on. The best tennis players are like door-to-door salesmen: they won’t take no for an answer. For the ultimate example, look at Novak Djokovic, who spent his 2011 season proving that there is no such thing as a lost cause.
Now it is Djokovic who stands in Murray’s path tonight, and he will make an intimidating opponent. The Serb has won the last three hard-court Grand Slams, and comes into the final with a 27-match winning streak on the “Deco Turf” of New York and the Plexicushion of Melbourne.
It was reported last week that Djokovic felt he needed to maintain “a professional distance” from Murray and the other players at the top of the rankings ladder.
“We like each other and there is mutual respect,” he was quoted as saying, “but common sense tells you we can’t be best friends and hang out.”
Yet no one can doubt that the combatants share both a long history and a mutual affection.
They have been slugging it out on the tennis court, and sometimes on the PlayStation console, since they were 11 years old. And when the football teams of Serbia and Scotland faced each other on Saturday afternoon, they watched the match together in the locker room.
“We took the computer and we watched,” Djokovic said on Sunday. “We tried to be quiet, but inside we were cheering for our own national teams. I think two minutes before the end he went to warm up [for the semi-final against Tomas Berydych]. Then we had the great chance, but we missed. I think 0-0 was fair.”
The tough thing about tennis is that you cannot have a draw, no matter how harsh it often seems for one player to finish as a loser. Murray’s Australian Open semi-final against Djokovic in January was a good example.
The two men all but cancelled each other out for nearly five hours, with the momentum swinging back and forth like a pendulum, before the defending champion eventually sealed his place in the final. Amazingly, Djokovic went on to win an even longer match against Rafael Nadal just two days later.
Before that epic meeting in Melboune, Murray’s coach Ivan Lendl said to him “You’ll win, but you’re going to have to go through a lot of pain to get there, so be ready for that.” Lendl was only half right, as it happened.
But the same rules apply tonight. If Murray is to dethrone the king of Flushing Meadows, he will have to spend three or four relentless hours attacking the most watertight defence in tennis. There is no easy way to beat Djokovic, as the unfortunate David Ferrer discovered yesterday.
That is the kind of resistance Murray will be up against today. And he can expect to see a lot more of Djokovic over the next few years, too. These old combatants have played each other four times this season — with the results standing at two wins apiece — to take the overall tally to 8-6 in Djokovic’s favour. They must be on the point of replacing the Roger Federer-Rafael Nadal battle as the central rivalry in tennis.
“This is probably the last big match I will play this year,” said Murray, after his own semi-final on Saturday afternoon.
Sooner or later, he is going to win one of these things, and give Scotland a permanent place on the tennis map.[TelegraphUk]
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