Andy Murray Can Win More Slams
Updated: 12:16am UK, Monday 08 July 2013
By Chris Skudder, Sky News Sports Presenter
The wags didn't waste any time with a cheeky overhead backhand smash at the post-match media conference.
"Andy, how does it feel to be the first Brit to win Wimbledon in shorts?!" one journalist quipped.
It was a winning reference to the fact that the last time a man from Britain won the world's most coveted title, he was wearing long trousers, or "long flannel pants" as Fred Perry's daughter Penny told Sky News last night.
For a nation where the game was first thought up, 77 years is a ridiculously long wait.
Fred Perry's 1936 final opponent Gottfried Von Cramm went on to win the Iron Cross for Germany in the Second World War.
Murray wasn't even born when Perry was immortalised in a bronze statue at the All England Club in the mid-1980s, half a century after winning his first All England Club title in 1934.
Perry was widely regarded as one of the greats, winning eight of what we now call Grand Slam titles between 1933 and 1936, including three at Wimbledon and all three of the other Slams - the US, Australian and French Opens - in that short spell of domination.
So where does that place Murray? Without doubt he has some catching up to do on Perry, even though Fred played at a time when the competition was never as fierce as it is now.
Murray can count one Wimbledon and one US Open title alongside his five final defeats.
But he's only 26 and can probably look forward to four or five more years at the top.
It's probably fair to say he may never win the French on the slow red clay, a surface that most of the world's greatest ever hard and grass court players have never been able to master.
Sampras, for all his seven Wimbledons, never won the French Open, and even the greatest of them all, Roger Federer, with his seven Wimbledons, only managed to squeeze out one title at Roland Garros (though he had the misfortune to lose four finals there to the near-unbeatable clay court master Rafa Nadal).
There's every chance though that Murray will add to his tally of Grand Slams on the hard courts at the US Open, where he'll be defending champion in September; in Australia, where he's tasted defeat in three finals already and will be busting a gut to put that right next January; and at Wimbledon, where he'll already be favourite to repeat his victory next July.
Tennis, like all sports, goes in cycles. Federer and Nadal had their period of domination (and are still very capable of winning more Slams) but this now feels like Murray's time, slugging it out with Djokovic for the world's top spot and the major tournaments along the way.
Three of the last four Grand Slam finals have featured the two top ranked players in the world, and Murray has now taken two of those three.
A fit and firing again Juan Martin Del Potro will be a major player too in the coming few years and would be a good bet to add to his one Slam in the US four years ago.
How many Grand Slams can Murray go on to win? He'll never catch Federer with his incredible all-time high of 17, nor Nadal's 12. Djokovic has six, mostly down to an iron will to win, an extraordinary durability, like Nadal, and capacity for comebacks.
Murray has always had the talent and ability but has now added mental strength, doggedness and hunger for more. You wouldn't be surprised if he went on to win four or five more of the big titles.
They always say in sport you have to lose first to be able to learn to win. Like his game-changing coach Ivan Lendl, Murray lost his first four Grand Slam finals, which only served to perpetuate the legend of the choking Brits.
But once he'd felt able to manage the unfair expectation that gets heaped on any half decent British player wielding a racket, he got that first title out of the way in New York last September.
With the barriers down he's now broken through at the last bastion of expectation, Wimbledon HQ. Home at last.
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