ANDY MURRAY cannot wait for the most stressful Wimbledon build-up of his career to end.
And having battled through a hip injury to make it to the SW19 start-line, the defending champion will relish handling a different, more welcome kind of pressure: playing on Centre Court.
Murray as good as admitted there were times last week when he wasn’t sure he would be fit to face maverick Alexander Bublik this afternoon, after his preparations were thrown into disarray by the injury.
Murray said: “I mean, you never know. I haven’t been in that sort of position too often, like only a few days before a Slam, and not felt good at all.
“It hasn’t really happened to me much.
“Obviously this is an extremely important tournament, so you worry a little bit.
“It’s a little bit stressful if you can’t practise for a few days, you really want to be preparing, training as much as you can to get ready and make you feel better, especially when you hadn’t had any matches.
“But I just tried to think positively. I tried to make the best decisions along with my team to give myself the best chance to feel good on Monday.
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“I feel like I’ve done that.”
From the sound of things, that meant Murray telling his notoriously demanding head coach Ivan Lendl that he had to take a complete break from the practice court to have any chance of making it to today’s traditional Wimbledon curtain-raiser.
Murray said: “With something like that, a lot of it has to really come from the player because you know what you can and can’t tolerate.
“We made the decision on Tuesday that, after I hit for a little bit in the morning, I needed to take a few days’ break if I was going to give myself the best chance to be ready.
“There was no use pushing for, like, three or four days, making myself worse.
“When it comes to an injury or pain that you’re getting in your body, everyone feels different things.
“Everyone has different pain thresholds. You need to be the one that makes those decisions.
“I've had hip problems since I was very young. It's just been very sore the last few weeks. It was giving me quite a lot of trouble moving to certain shots and getting into certain positions.
“So that was why I needed to take the break, to try and give it a chance to settle down, calm down a bit.
“I spent a lot of time with my physio and doing some extra exercises in my warmup, strengthening exercises, a lot of stuff to try to loosen off that area.
“But once you tell the coaches, ‘Right, I'm good to go,’ it's back over to them to get you doing the right things on the practice court.”
It was in a hit with Grigor Dimitrov on Tuesday that Murray’s hip problem flared up.
Practising for 90 minutes with the same player yesterday morning, the Scot looked much more comfortable, if still not quite 100 per cent.
Murray said: “The last few days have been very good. Practice each day has got a little bit better.
“It's been slightly stop-start preparations. But each day I've felt better.
“But a little bit like at the French Open, where maybe I didn't come in as well-prepared, I still found a way with each match to feel a bit better, and built confidence each day.
“So, I'm hoping that's the case here.”
At 1pm, the will-he-won’t-he debate about Britain’s foremost summer sport superstar will at last be over.
Murray and livewire opponent Bublik will walk on to Centre Court and the world No 1 will be able to go back to worrying about what happens in that little rectangle of grass.
Murray said: “There are maybe a few more nerves especially at this Slam with the way the scheduling is, that you're the first one out there on Centre Court.
“You feel like you're opening up the tournament a little bit, and that adds a few more nerves.
“There's pressure on this event because it's one of the most important we play during the whole year.
“If I wasn't nervous or didn't feel any pressure, then I'd be very worried by that.
“I want to be nervous. I want to feel the pressure at these events.”
But not the stress of wondering whether he’d be fit to play at all.
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