The 1967 devaluation of the pound. The Suez Crisis. Nick Leeson. The collapse of British Leyland. The end of the Raj. The decline of the Liverpool docks. The Winter Of Discontent. All these national humiliations can now be wiped off our slate, 'cos the boy gone done it. Finally, after 77 years of hurt (or 117, if you are a Scottish nationalist), Britain can start to rebuild from its queasy sense of decline. That's right: We're the kings of the world again.
Today Murray belongs to everyone who ever had a dream of winning Wimbledon but couldn’t be arsed with practising night and day for fucking years. Everyone who is dying of cancer in a far-flung oncology ward who really just wanted to see a Brit take home the biggest trophy in tennis. Every soldier firing mortar rounds into Helmand mountain ranges who just wanted to end 77 years of post-Fred Perry hurt. Every tiny crack baby who can now grow up in a country where a man now living has won seven consecutive games at the All-England Club.
The Myth Of Wimbledon has been etched on our national consciousness as sharply as any Arthurian legend. The ledge in this case is a bloke called Andy who probably likes Mumfords and Dexter more than is strictly necessary, but the task he was given was only one down from slaying a dragon or getting a magic sword from some woman in a pond. Joan Of Arc probably had a more flexible "to do" list: Hey Andy, can you restore British pride and get this horrible weight of cod-historical loserdom off our backs by winning the toughest tennis contest in the world? And if you can’t, would you mind it if our naive expectations of you gradually curdle into vague resentment?
“The few days before the tournament are very difficult,” Murray is on record as saying about Wimbledon. “It’s just kind of everywhere you go… It's been very, very difficult.” Classic British understatement? After all, like any true kidnapping victim, Andy had already had to watch the worst things in the world happen to someone else before it was his turn. For much of the late 90s, Britain tortured an amiable minor player who was probably the eighth best in the world on his best days, simply because he hadn’t managed to become the absolute best player in the world. Never mind the fact that he consistently made it to the Wimbledon final four – miraculously gutsy, considering his thin supply of talent – Tim Henman still had to trudge his way through a media Vietnam, as every year we all proclaimed him a golden god in the quarters then jumped on him and beat him with sticks and called him a "choker", a "wimp", when he inevitably slumped out in the semis.
At least Henman just came across as a bloody decent chap who was a good egg and jolly spirited and whatnot. For Murray, there was always a sinister undertow to the coverage as reporters worked out that he was a bit of a clamface. He knew that not only were we going to jump on him if he (we) didn’t win: the basic facts of his awkward, media-unfriendly personality would be the guillotine we used to behead him. “What people don’t seem to realise,” he told another reporter, “is that it’s incredibly difficult to win these events… I don’t think that’s understood sometimes.” As insights go, it’s more one into Murray’s mindset than any profundity about competitive tennis. Text: “Tennis is quite hard.” Subtext: “Could you guys possibly just lay off me for five minutes so I don’t have to go into the garage and drive the cordless drill through the back of my hand just for an excuse to get out of this waking nightmare?” Simply to maintain his psychological health he needed to win Wimbledon. And when your psychological health is dependent upon winning Wimbledon, something has probably gone badly wrong in your life.
Still, it’s undeniable that people run at least a tenth of a second faster when you are pointing a loaded gun in their direction. For Djokovic, despite the President of Serbia turning up to watch, and despite the notoriously vicious puns of Serbian newspaper headline writers, national humiliation was not a terror he had to face.
When Murray actually won, we realised we had been conning ourselves about the decline of Britain all along. Seeing him do it felt like watching a reel of the demolition of the Clyde shipyards run in reverse. While Salmond and Cameron stood around fighting about whether to claim him for Unionism or Nationalism, the lessons of Sunday transcended mere ideology, and spoke to ancient spirit-of-the-soil voodoo about our destiny. Scottish? British? Manx? Falklander? Who cares when we are beginning to understand how super-good it is to wake up living in a nation of winners every day?
Britain doesn’t like amiable losers from now on. In fact we hate those guys, 'cos they are #losers. Amiable winners we love. But dour and unsporting winners we love, too. Winning’s the thing in our post-Murray world. Foppish Hugh Grant types cheerily struggling to second-last can suck it. Those guys were just some lies we told ourselves to make ourselves feel less terrible back when we were shit at everything. The plot of Cool Runnings can screw itself. Most British films since 1989 should now be burnt in state-sponsored pyres in the market squares of every town from Winchester to Weighton. From now on, I command British cinema to start churning out un-heart-warming stories about non-plucky, muscly British favourites screwing the bejesus out of "plucky" foreign underdogs with zero mercy: predictably advancing to the finals of everything because they train harder, they train smarter and they have balls of solid plutonium.
The fact is, we’ve always secretly known that if we could just find a way to talk ourselves out of this terrible internal monologue of glorious defeat, if we could do national CBT on ourselves, we could easily become 1870s-era awesome once more. Suddenly, from Frome to Cook to Rose, we are now hard-as-nails sporting alphas, and the temperature of this martial island has been raised forever. Like you all, today I am going to go out and do winner things instead of the loser things I did last week. I will laugh more loudly in restaurants. I will hug people with more of a sense of entitlement. I will try and be a more stentorian father. Yet I will be a more sensitive lover. Eat more bran. Fifty push-ups before bed. And I will remember, always and everywhere, that we may not run everything from Jakarta to Johannesburg any more, but British declinism is over.British power and influence is back where it belongs. Even First Capital Connect can’t mess with us now.Follow Gavin and Marta on Twitter: @hurtgavinhaynes / @MartaParszeniewIllustration by Marta Parszeniew.Previously – The Scent of Freshly Mown Binary
