Murray taking a baseball bat to his own caricature

Updated: 15:57 EST, 1 July 2008

Television's Spitting Image update, Headcases, runs a sketch called 'Andy Murray Sings Party Classics' in which the new Popeye of British sport mumbles along to dance anthems like Alastair Darling reading out his Budget.

'Andy Murray's joyless moaning is the sound of summer,' exults the announcer as we observe the hero of Centre Court droning: 'I'm a Barbie Girl, in a Barbie world,' in a monotone that suggests he really is 'more miserable than a truck driver paying fuel tax'.

It's hard to recall a figure in British life smashing his own public image as macho Murray did against the gasket-blowing Richard Gasquet on Monday night. The lugubrious Andy Murray gave way to a rampant Highland warrior.

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Surly Scot to Highlandwarrior: in one epic match, Andy Murray has smashed his lugubrious public image lampooned in Headcases

'Gordon Brown's love child,' as one Wimbledon punter described him last week, finished it all off by parading biceps that may not have been Ben Nevis but certainly one of the more respectable Scottish peaks.

Another Scot, the ex-Liberal leader David Steel, never quite escaped the Spitting Image parody of him living in the SDP head honcho David Owen's breast pocket and blamed it for the decline of his political career. Murray, though, has taken a baseball bat to his own caricature, as if to prove that the love or disapproval of the mob can turn on a single drop shot.

Murray has had a makeover, that much is clear. Off went the cap, out came his humour and into the skip went the old introspection, though you will have noticed him smacking himself round the head as he grappled with Gasquet, who embodied the tension in French sport between genius and neurosis.

At one point, Tim Henman's alter ego became distracted by an attempt to gouge out his own eye.

After the euphoria, the dramaexhaustion of Monday night, now is the time to say Gasquet choked within serving distance of a crushing triumph from which Murray may never have recovered.

At 5-4 in the third set and two sets to love, Gasquet stood at that canyon in sport where the greats jump across and the merely good often fall on to the rocks below. Spooked by his failure to close the deal in that third set, Gasquet capitulated in the face of Murray's newly-minted aggression. Thus we were witnesses to one of those forked-road moments when one man is broken and another made.

But here comes a disquieting voice. Rafael Nadal will extend no such charity today. Distress flares will not rise from his courtside chair, as they did from Gasquet's, and the rigour, precision and spirit will not evaporate from his game, as they did from Gasquet's when the crowd must have started to appear to him as some diabolical welcoming committee from hell.

A reminder, here, that nothing can surpass sport's one-on-one confrontations. A pair of prizefighters, goalkeeper vs penalty-taker, two fine racket-men on Centre Court.

Me or you. Conquer or submit. Survive or perish where you stand. Something Bjorn Borg said to me before this tournament bubbled up in the consciousness: 'I think Andy can handle British expectations well. But what he really needs is to go out and play those tough fiveset matches.'

Lo, that's just what he got, just when he needed it most, before a reckoning with the conquistador Nadal, who has Roger Federer's great Wimbledon sequence in his cross-hairs and possesses all the physical might and mental obduracy Murray seemed to lack when he was plodding away from Queen's holding his sore thumb. Borg was talking about the need to walk through an inferno.

Yesterday, Murray must have inspected himself for fire damage and found his whites miraculously undamaged. This must be bliss for a professional athlete : the knowledge that you survived the ordeal. Not just survived, but prospered and woke the next morning awash with lactic acid but a higher sense of self.

This was the Turkey v Czech Republic or Turkey v Croatia of men's tennis. It took Murray's lurch into mad-eyed belligerence for us to realise what was special about the old Centre Court reserve. It put the game, the contest, above the emotional incontinence of modern spectating and I, for one, will object if the new bearpit ethos becomes so extreme that Murray's opponents are impeded.

Faced by initial English frostiness (downright hostility, in some cases), Murray is smart enough to have applied basic mob psychology. Maybe he tried some Californian shouting therapy. Perhaps he swallowed that line from Gladiator: 'The crowd love a barbarian . . . thrust a sword into a man's flesh and the crowd will love you.'

Better yet, fight back from two sets down against the No 8 seed to prevail in three hours, 57 minutes and the crowd will love you, because the middle classes, with their Corinthian traditions, will always put love's kettle on for a young man who jolly well pulls himself together just in time.

This is the bedrock of our sport, after all. We value pluck more highly than skill, though Murray has plenty of that. But he'll need a whole new shipment of both if he is to get past Nadal.

Euro still a valued currency

Football between nations is back at the top of the billboard where it belongs.

Thanks to Euro 2008, it still means more to win a trophy for your people than for your club.

For that, we can pass our gratitude to the hundreds of players who went to Austria and Switzerland, not to pine for the Champions League and all its trinkets, but to run around with sincere and boundless energy. Two words: they cared.

Witness the endless foraging of Fernando Torres, exuberance of Cesc Fabregas, the defiance of the Turks, even the fervour of Michael Ballack, whose hounding of the referee was the one stain on a grand finale.

Just about every big name forced to postpone his holiday for the good of the homeland performed as if this were the climax to their season and not some leisurewrecking add-on.

This, in an age when the stars can hoover up £3million a year from their clubs but take only buttons for pulling on their national colours.

The ceaseless encroachments of domestic and Champions League power raised the fear that a European Championship might end up somewhere betweenthe InterToto and UEFA Cups.

Club football belongs to the few. The international game is owned by all of us.

All bar three or four of the 16 combatants ran a Flymo over the game'snewtestament of suffocating defence. The number of bodies a side could squeeze behind the ball was not the measure of excellence.

Spirited, tails-up football poured from our screens and into the stadiums where a tournament was again needlessly chopped in two, thus diffusing the dramatic tension on the streets for both hosts.

No tournament in living memory has shown up the more static, wooden, frightened players as human clutter in a game that exists to facilitate self expression.

Last thought on Spain. Scouse hilarity will greet the idea of Roman Abramovich bidding £80million for Fernando Torres. More so, the thought of Liverpool actually selling. Well, Chelsea’s owner has just spent £17.2m on Lucian Freud’s Benefits
Supervisor Sleeping and £44.2m on Francis Bacon’s Triptych, 1976 apparently to please his girlfriend Daria Zhukova, who is opening a gallery in Moscow (note to art
thieves — you’re advised to take your shoplifting somewhere else). How much would Abramovich dole out to impress Big Phil Scolari?

Johnno strikes

Martin Johnson stormed the England manager's office yesterday, taking care not to trip on the RFU knife protruding from Brian Ashton's back, and no doubt praying the fax machine would not be spewing summonses from New Zealand police investigating a possible allegation of sexual assault relating to four of the squad who faced the All Blacks.

A declaration was made with Johnson's first elite player squad. In Mike Tindall, he speared a future royal. Nor did Ben Kay or Joe Worsley receive special dispensation for being fellow World Cup winners.

David Strettle, England's best young wing, has paid an appropriately high price for being named by a New Zealand woman as one of the party animals still stranded in a fog of suspicion.

It's not possible to verify whether 'Johnno' came in through the door at Twickenham or crashed through a window in riot gear, but already there is the sense of a major arrival, a power shift from players back to management. Not before time.