Andy Murray: ‘I feel for younger players like Emma Raducanu — there’s less pressure on me now’
The two-time Wimbledon champion is set to begin his 15th Championships at the All England Club. He tells Katie Strick why he’s in his best shape since surgery and refusing to let the recent painting drama dent his optimism
The gardeners are doing the final touch-ups on Murray Mound. The ball boys and girls are into their last days of training. And Sir Andy Murray — British tennis legend, two-time Wimbledon champion and former world No 1 — is having his hair cut.
It’s not the reason I expect my interview with the famously unflashy, down-to-earth Scot to be delayed when I greet him at the All England Club in south-west London just days before the start of the home Grand Slam event he is about to undertake for the 15th time.
The two-time Wimbledon champion is set to begin his 15th Championships at the All England Club. He tells Katie Strick why he’s in his best shape since surgery and refusing to let the recent painting drama dent his optimism.
He seems chirpy, chilled-out even, for a man just days away from the tournament he has won twice and had his sights set on for months now, swerving the French Open in May and pulling out of last week’s doubles tournament at Queens to focus on training on grass for the 2023 Championships. After being defeated by Australian 24-year-old Alex de Minaur — the boyfriend of British No 1 Katie Boulter — in the first round of the Queen’s singles, all eyes are on the gritty, plainspoken Scotsman to prove his comeback on the grass courts of SW19.
Murray crashed out of the 2022 tournament in the second round and has made it clear he wants to have a deeper run this year, even if the odds are against him making it to the final (there are only 32 seeds for Wimbledon so being unseeded at No 38 means he could play the likes of Novak Djokovic or Carlos Alcaraz in the first round). But any heat he is feeling about going in front of the nation at his most beloved Grand Slam is well disguised.
Greeting me cheerily, he switches straight into reflective mode, telling me he is relishing every minute of that second chance post hip-surgery (“with everything that’s gone on with the injuries and stuff over the last few years, I want to make the most of these last few tours”) and explaining it is the younger players like Emma Raducanu and new No 1 Alcaraz, both 20, whom he feels sorry for, still dealing with the pressures of overnight success and under the brutal spotlight of social media.
Clearly this is a man who knows himself very well by now. He is at home here at the All England Club, the setting for so many of his highest career moments and just a 25-minute drive from his home in Oxshott, Surrey, smiling when I ask him about some of the changes to this year’s event, like the promise of AI commentary on some of its highlights clips. “I’d probably prefer my commentators to be doing it live, but yeah I’ll be really interested to see what that’s like,” he laughs.
We are sitting in the brand’s newly unveiled SW19 Fan Experience, a flower-filled fan zone plastered with Murray’s face across almost every surface. It’s little surprise his team has chosen this particular corner of the site for our meeting. Just a few hundred metres away sits a rather less flattering unveiling for the man widely considered Britain’s greatest tennis player of all time: a new Wimbledon artwork commissioned as a tribute to the tournament’s past, present and future champions and featuring everyone from Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal to the Williams sisters, Björn Borg and John McEnroe. The reason it has been doing the rounds on Twitter in recent days? Murray, the man who ended 77 years of British hurt and once a key member of the Federer and co clan, is nowhere to be seen.
Murray, a keen art fan, insists he “wasn’t particularly bothered” about the painting when he saw it (his mum Judy and brother Jamie both spent recent days giving angry comments to the press, Jamie asking ‘Where’s Andy Murray?” and Judy calling it “appalling at every level”), adding: “I don’t think that me being excluded from it was the biggest issue with the painting, to be honest” before a member of his team politely requests that I leave that part out in a favour to the All England Club.
