James Lawton: Great Scot has will to win Wimbledon

For the first time since Fred Perry, Britain has a genuine contender on grass. James Lawton explains why Andy Murray is threatening to topple the biggest names at SW19

(SANG TAN/AP)

Let's forget the Bunny Austin nostalgia that Andy Murray inevitably provoked yesterday when he became the first Brit to land the Queen's Club title in 71 years – and the fact that he is bearing down on Wimbledon in the centenary year of Fred Perry, the last male tennis player from these islands to take on the world and give it a good whipping.

The need is to push all that to one side not out of any disrespect for those fine representatives of a somewhat different game, and certainly a different world, but because if ever a young man of today lived in his own time, and his own space, it is the one from Dunblane.

Some fear that Murray is about to be submerged in the Wimbledon hysteria that so often stretched the essential good nature of Tim Henman to breaking point – and piled vastly too much pressure on a talent that was considerable, and marvellously worked upon, but unfortunately not considerable enough.

That concern is not shared here. Why? It is because Murray and Henman are quite different animals.

Henman was a fighter, an over-achiever and a hoper, and thoroughly admirable for that, but Murray is something quite else.

Murray is a natural-born winner. He is no more likely to be weighed down by other people's hopes than he is to be drawn into the hype that surrounds him on any other basis than that it is a professional obligation.

When Henman scowled and pumped his fist you could not but see a little bit of role playing, a gesture or two for the denizens of the hillock that carried his name. That didn't mean that he wasn't playing from his guts. But it didn't wash the way Murray's visceral antics do. It didn't quite emanate from his bones. Murray, we saw again yesterday when the good player and amiable soul James Blake, was eventually battered out of contention, is a prisoner to nobody and nothing except himself and his own competitive nature.

Of course, the professional requirement was to talk of Wimbledon and his prospects and, sensibly, he gave himself a good chance if he played well. He also reminded his more adoring interrogators that he just happened to have two of the greatest players of any tennis era blocking his path. However, no one could accuse Andrew Murray of being coy, and he was, plainly, not likely to forget that despite the victory in Paris, Roger Federer is perhaps not what he was and Rafael Nadal is not even guaranteed to pass his fitness tests.

So, yes, at 22 for Murray opportunity isn't so much knocking as clamouring for due recognition. Surely, it will not be ignored this side of blazing defiance of the idea that his education is still incomplete.

Boris Becker was just 17 when he successfully besieged the Centre Court and, though it may be true that Murray's ambition has taken rather longer to ripen, there is something about his bearing, and his game, which suggests that he may well be about to harvest his rewards.

Such hopes flowered last season when he recovered from evisceration by Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon, beat him at the US Open and reached the final with Federer, but a blight came in Flushing Meadows. Murray couldn't take his chance; he was reminded of the pain which came at Wimbledon when Nadal engulfed him with such power he must have felt he had engaged not with a superior tennis player but a force of nature.

Murray doesn't look like a potential victim of natural forces any more. No, Murray looks formidably strong. Plainly he has done his physical work and out of it has come a new certainty.

Another difference between Henman and Murray is the one that separates hopeful speculation and a degree of hard conviction. When Henman played Pete Sampras you could only marvel that he had kept his nerve and fought his way into such company; when Murray plays Federer or Nadal now he simply cannot be discounted. He has the strength, the shots and carriage of a champion in the making.

It wasn't always so, of course. His talent was self-evident but his personality was somewhat problematic. You worried that he could see the black dog too easily on a sunny afternoon when he had everything before him. But certainly there was no sense of that yesterday when he won his seventh of nine finals in 12 months with the confidence befitting a player who in that time had been obliged to bend before only the talent of Federer and Nadal.

This is a rarefied competitive atmosphere indeed and there is no doubt that Murray is thriving on its exclusivity. Federer may still own a talent that is sublime, and it is probably true that the immense game of Nadal is merely suffering just a touch of high-grade metal fatigue, but there is a dimension to Murray that is surely growing before our eyes, and no doubt those are the men who have reason to recognise him as their principal threat.

He is going to Wimbledon with what he describes as the form of his life and this, after all the Centre Court years of exaggerated, even ultimately pathetic yearnings, is a self-assessment as unanswerable as one of those lacerating forehands which yesterday made the Harvard-taught Blake feel the need for a whole new education.

It was always going to take a special force to break through the time-honoured feebleness of British tennis since the days of Perry, and if Henman was admired for the persistence of his attempt, and the gallantry he so often brought to the task, we can see easily enough that the serious embrace of the challenge has come from Murray.

Of course, he cannot offer any guarantees at Wimbledon, except perhaps the one that disappeared when Perry put away his rackets. It is that, finally, the home of tennis's greatest tournament has a real and indisputably brilliant contender.