Oh the weight, the weight, the terrible, terrible weight of expectation! It’s all we hear about these days. The reason Our Brave Boys in South Africa have been making such a pig’s ear of things is — yes! — the weight of expectation. The reason that the Brave French Boys in South Africa made even more of an oreille de cochon of things is that they, too, are unable to bear the weight of expectation.
Over here in the London Borough of Merton, there have been an awful lot of people suffering under the unbearable heaviness of being expected to play reasonably well at a professional sporting event. Anne Keothavong, Plucky Brit, blew a 4-0 lead in the final set and said: “There’s so much pressure on us all here.”
The British contingent on the female side, PBs to a woman, are 0 for 6, as the Americans would say. I counted six PBs in, I counted six PBs out. Woeful. Jamie Baker, one of two Brits in the men’s side, went out in straight sets. The other won. But he’s not really a PB, he’s Andy Murray and he actually wins stuff. And for that reason, the weight of expectation for him is pretty much the world.
Now hear a plain fact: all athletes must bear the weight of expectation. It’s part of the job, like accountants being able to do sums and journalists being able to write quickly. Being able to bear the weight of expectation is a basic requirement of success.
The better you are, the greater the weight you must bear, and the better you must be at bearing it.
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Do you think Rafael Nadal bears no weight of expectation, or Roger Federer? Do you think Brazil bear no weight of expectation, or Argentina? So here comes Murray, arriving off a truly dreadful run of results, to heft his own weight of expectation and see if he can shoulder the burden. It came in the form of a warm round of cheering as as he made his way through the entry and the warm-up. It’s expectation, sure, but it’s also love. Is that such a terrible thing?
He played Jan Hajek, of the Czech Republic, an almost perfectly designed first-round opponent, being ranked No 90 in the world with only one win on grass in his career, juniors and professional. It was a match of three halves: Murray won 7-5, 6-1, 6-2, recovering from a distinctly dodgy start to exert complete control.
There were some awkward bits in that first set. Hajek came out blasting, determined to take as many with him as he could, hammering out of the traps and hitting the lines with a great flat, slappy forehand. Murray promptly mislaid his first serve and his second serve is a weakness known across the game. Hajek piled into three sit-up-and-beg second serves and broke for 3-1.
Murray was groping for his game, prodding the ball into play and occasionally unleashing a wild forehand just to show that there was no truth in all that talk about him being too passive. But he regrouped and broke back. You could say that Hajek was suffering from the lack of expectation.
Certainly, he started to play as he may have been expected to, losing his accuracy as Murray fed him lots of off-speed stuff. Hajek tried to generate his own pace and mostly missed. It was very obliging of him, to be sure, and Murray settled happily into the role of benign dictator.
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He deserved this comparatively novel sensation. After all, this has been a very trying few months. Since he lost in the final of the Australian Open in January, he has hardly been able to put the ball in court. Perhaps it was the disappointment. Perhaps it was the weight of expectation — his own, that is. But certainly Wimbledon represents a perfect kill-or-cure for what ails him. “Coming here helps,” he said. “It’s a great place to play. There’s pressure on me to play well, but that’s something I need, to refocus me. I always enjoy big tournaments. You want to compete in the big events against the best players.”
Do you think we could have these simple sportsmanly words written in letters of fire on the England dressing room today and in the locker room at Wimbledon next year? These things are, after all, what big-time professional sport is all about.
At the end, the crowd gave him huge and affectionate applause, and he basked in it like a cat in the sun. Murray left the court feeling ten times better than he did when he walked in. Wimbledon can do that to tennis players. Expectation cuts both ways: you can use it to your advantage, as Murray did yesterday.
It has its problems, being a Brit at Wimbledon, but so does everything else in sport. The weight of expectation was a positive inspiration to Tim Henman on countless occasions.
So now it is up to Murray to take this expectation and use it for all he is worth, to surf the wave of crowd noise on those big points, to revel in the fact that so many people desperately want him to do well, to relish the fact that so many will rejoice not only in his fortune but also in his opponent’s cock-ups. It’s hard for a Brit at Wimbledon, but it’s a damn sight harder for everybody else.