The Thirteenth Day: the daily preview
History is certain to be made on Centre Court this afternoon as an eagerly-anticipated Gentlemen's Singles Final brings The Championships 2012 to a thrilling climax. Should it be Roger Federer who lifts the handsome gold trophy he will join William Renshaw and Pete Sampras as a seven-time Champion. If, on the other hand, Andy Murray prevails he will have swept aside the cobwebs festooning Britain's involvement with Wimbledon for the past 76 years.
A victorious Murray would provoke a sporting celebration in keeping with the best this country has ever staged. If you have to go back to 1936 for Fred Perry's last win for a British man, you would also need to evoke memories of the 1966 World Cup win by England or Ashes cricket triumphs over Australia to match the outpouring of joy a Murray triumph would yield.
Murray would not be human if he did not feel the weight of expectation lying like a concrete block across his shoulders. All we need to do is amend Admiral Nelson's famous clarion call "England expects..." to "Britain expects" in order to accommodate the fact that Andy is Scottish and proud of it.
The support inside Centre Court, on Henman Hill in front of the giant TV screen and all across the nation will be immense, but it is not as if he is contesting the world's greatest tennis final with a despised opponent. Federer, as Novak Djokovic discovered in Friday's semi-final, is a firm Centre Court favourite, so quite a few loyalties may be divided.
A Federer win is regarded the likeliest outcome by those who like a wager, the 30-year-old Swiss being the odds-on favourite, and the statistics stack up on his side of the net.
He is the first player to reach eight Wimbledon singles finals (having lost just one, to Rafael Nadal in 2008) since 1922, when they abolished the Challenge Round, which permitted the defending champion not to show up until the next year's final. He has also defeated Murray twice in Grand Slam finals (US 2008, Australian 2010) without conceding a set. He has now reached 24 Grand Slam singles finals - including at least one every year for the past 10 years - and won 16 of them, a record.
The Swiss will hardly be in urgent need of today's first prize of £1,150,000 but he will assuredly appreciate the fact that victory will not only earn him a seventh Wimbledon singles trophy for the shelf of memories, but also allow him to match Sampras’s record of 286 total weeks as the world’s best player.
Murray, meanwhile, is one of only two players to lead a head-to-head rivalry with Federer (Nadal is the other), having won eight of their 15 clashes, but his record at the very top is the question mark he needs to erase today. Not a set has been gained in his three Grand Slam finals to date, and he is also attempting to avoid matching the miserable record of his current coach, Ivan Lendl, in losing his first four Grand Slam singles finals, though if he could emulate Lendl by going on to win eight major titles there would be no complaints from the British No.1.
"It's a great challenge," said Murray after his semi-final victory over Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. "I'm probably not expected to win the final but if I play well I'm capable of winning it. Federer's record here over the past 10 years has been incredible, so there is less pressure on me because of who he is...He's obviously one of the greatest ever. The possibility of beating Roger is obviously something very nice but I can't allow myself to think that far ahead."
Federer has spoken warmly of Murray's skills on many occasions and he was happy to go on the record again in advance of this afternoon's titanic occasion.
"In Britain you don't have the number of players from, say, France or America, so the focus is more on the one player, who is Andy Murray. People here should be happy that he's such a great player and he's only going to get better as time goes by. I love it that I’m going to be playing him. I always say in whatever country I am I like to play the local hero, and Andy is exactly that here at Wimbledon."
Whether the local hero can set the place alight by defeating the best of the best is the question everyone will be asking, with fingers firmly crossed.
