Andy Murray: how the gawky, shy teenager battled to become one of the world’s best and a reluctant feminist icon

Head down examining my camera, I was walking through a corridor below centre court in Rome in 2017 when my nose bumped into the sweaty chest of a wild beast hooked up to wires tying him to the stadium.

This was the ultimate image of Andy Murray: a mad Scotsman, stretching in silent agony, determined to play on a stage that is a prison and palace for the obsessives and perfectionists at his maniac level.

But I couldn’t take that photo. Murray, recognising me from covering tournaments since he was a teenager, didn’t want to be seen this way. His trainers expressed a terrible concern in their eyes. They didn’t want anyone to know that Murray was on his last legs, like a wounded animal staggering for shelter.

Defending a title he took from Novak Djokovic in steady rain in 2016, Murray would lose that 2017 match 6-2, 6-4 to a swaggering Fabio Fognini, whose drop shots caused Andy to yell out, “I can’t f****** move.”

Yet he kept fighting for almost two more years.

At Roland Garros in 2017, he was a punch-drunk boxer crying into a towel between points. He lacked the energy to berate his team or whine about the intrusive overhead “spyder cam” that triggered him to blow an early lead in the 2016 French Open to Djokovic.