TOO MUCH of a MURRAY

I knew for certain sure that The Guardian would not run the letter I emailed on Saturday. It went: “73 years of hurt” (front page July 4). Are you serious?

I quite often write to the paper about its sports coverage, which I find both meretricious and ubiquitous. Last summer I complained about the frequency with which both the main illustration on the front page of the paper and the cover-feature of the G2 supplement are sports-related. After all, there’s a dedicated sports section every day, 10 or 12 pages all week and 16 on Mondays. Today it’s the same: the front page has Roger Federer kissing the Wimbledon trophy and some yob of a cricketer is the cover star of G2 and interviewed inside. What do sportspeople ever have to say that can be of interest even to fanatics? “Yeah, I thought I played really well”. Oh, how bloody fascinating …

But clearly The Guardian considers sport a significant part of its appeal and suppresses criticism of either the amount or the tenor of its coverage. Although I regularly point out that the photographs of sportsmen that the paper favours almost never depict them doing the actual sport but instead roaring out aggression or pouring out emotion, nothing changes. Today’s edition carries five shots of Federer but in only one is he playing a stroke.

The “73 years of hurt” line referred to Andy Murray’s defeat in the Wimbledon semi-finals and the fact that Fred Perry won the men’s title as far back as 1936. “N years of hurt” has become sport’s banal way of referring to a period without trophies. Perhaps “N years of uninspired players who make so much money that their appetite for winning is dulled” would be more appropriate.

Why does it matter so much whether Murray wins the title? It’s not as if he’s an Englishman. The Wimbledon venue is formally called The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. Membership is limited: 375 enjoy the benefit of full participation. Past singles champions and “distinguished servants of the game” (which presumably refers to the game of croquet as well as that of tennis) are invited to join and a further hundred places are reserved for active members elected on an annual basis. The patron of the club, HM the Queen, has not attended the championships since her Silver Jubilee in 1977 when Virginia Wade won the ladies’ singles title, the last singles winner who was English.

As a Scot, Murray must count as a foreigner in the eyes of some of the crustier AELTC members. But really his nationality is irrelevant. He is not playing for his country but as a freelance individual, just like golfers in the Masters or the Open. If he were playing in the Davis Cup or the Ryder Cup or the upcoming Ashes cricket series, one could perhaps better understand some of the nationalistic nonsense that attaches to his progress through the championship. This nonsense is promulgated by the media, both press and broadcasting. Last Monday, Murray’s match under the new Centre Court roof dragged on until 10.45 at night. BBC1 carried it and later crowed about a 12 million audience. I am here to say that not all that audience was watching the tennis. Some of us were waiting with increasing outrage for the 10.00 o'clock News, the start of which was delayed until the match ended, despite the fact that, from 10.00 until 10.30, BBC2 was showing an old episode of Have I Got News for You?, a programme neither significant nor date-tied. It beggars belief that the tennis was not switched to disrupt the BBC2 rather than the BBC1 schedule.

The BBC gives blanket coverage to Wimbledon but has never shown much interest in the other three grand slam tournaments, even before live transmission rights were snapped up by satellite stations. This year just the finals of the French Open were covered on BBC2. By contrast, the Corporation gives a decent showing to those of the golf grand slam events to which it can get the rights – the Open and the Masters – and raises very little fuss about the respective nationalities of the participants. Of course it makes a difference that dozens of players are on the course simultaneously and that golf’s longueurs (walking between shots) do not lend themselves to the continuous following of one or two players. In golf coverage on both sides of the Atlantic, there is a disproportionate amount of interest in Tiger Woods because he is disproportionately gifted compared to the other players: still ranked world number one, even after being out of the game for eight months with an injury. Perhaps it is a relief, though, that he is not a British golfer.

At Wimbledon, one of the women players who went out in the first round was asked at the post-match press conference if she hadn’t “let the country down”. She burst into tears. It’s a pity she didn’t instead tell the stupid journalist to fuck off. As I say, “the country” doesn’t have any stake in what happens at Wimbledon. The supposedly serious media ought to take a more objective approach to sport, including its relative importance in the scheme of things.



One of Andy Murray's lovely ground strokes (from The Guardian website)