Andy Murray shouldn’t rely on injury-prone Emma Raducanu

Talk about raging against the dying of the light: Andy Murray and President Biden both. Murray because he is no longer as quick on his feet and Joe Biden because he’s no longer, well, quick. At all. Biden has said he will only step down if the Lord Almighty tells him to, and ethereal intervention might not be too far away, after the BBC’s Thought for the Day turned its spiritual gaze on to the Biden/Murray dilemma the other day.

Raducanu’s dodgy wrist was not good enough for tiger mum Judy Murray

Poor old Murray had tried to keep the end at bay with a mixed doubles partnership with golden girl Emma Raducanu. But this always seemed like a ropey idea dreamed up on the back of a PR man’s napkin after a few too many Pimm’s. Raducanu is one of the most gifted players around but also one of the most injury-prone, and you can’t count on her always being available. A singles player on a run of good results will always — quite rightly — put that above any doubles commitments. So Emma duly pulled out. She has hardly ever played grand slam doubles before anyway.

But her dodgy wrist was not good enough for tiger mum Judy Murray, who is turning into the Nigel Farage of British tennis. The decision was “astonishing,” she said through pursed social media lips. Later she added that she was just being “sarcastic,” though it doesn’t sound like any sarcasm I have heard before. Raducanu reacted rather brilliantly: “I’m sure she didn’t mean it,” she said ever so sweetly.

The Wimbledon crowd, like the Glyndebourne crowd, is not to everybody’s taste. It is certainly not to Novak Djokovic’s. He went absolutely mental — perhaps one too many bottles of healing Bosnian “pyramid water” that the eccentric old boy swears by — because the crowd had been booing him, in the guise of chanting “Ruuuuuune” for his opponent, Holger Rune. Good for Novak: the crowd were trying to get inside his head. And he knew it: this wasn’t the same as cricket fans chanting “Roooot” when the former England captain goes out to bat. And you have to celebrate when a megastar like Djoko, who clearly isn’t too bothered whether people like him or not, is prepared to take on that crowd.

The whole tournament is becoming agreeably spiky. An American player called Taylor Fritz, not to be confused with Taylor Swift (though it has happened), had a long and pointed conversation at the net with his defeated opponent Sascha Zverev. No, it was all good, Fritz said afterwards: he was just wishing me luck. Hmm. It seems that what Zverev had really been doing was telling Fritz to get his girlfriend to put a sock in it. She’s a comely influencer with 48 billion likes on TikTok who is called Morgan Riddle, and she had been highly visible up in Fritz’s box trying to goad Zverev over his problems with a former partner in the German courts.

It is always pleasing when sport takes a glance at the wider world, so it was impossible not to be moved by the Ukrainian Elina Svitolina making a powerful tear-spattered speech after easing her way to the quarter-finals on the day a children’s hospital in her homeland was blown to bits by Russian missiles. Wearing a black ribbon — for which Wimbledon had given special dispensation (thanks guys) — Svitolina said she hoped her victory was a “small light” for her people. “It’s very difficult to read the news. We feel guilt that we feel happy, but many people cannot leave the country — many people are at the war, fighting, defending our front lines.”

Many Ukrainian athletes are performing way above themselves right now. The world champion high jumper Yaroslava Mahuchikh broke a thirty-seven-year-old world record when she jumped a phenomenal 6ft 10in in Paris at the weekend. An Olympic gold next? You hope so, if only for the pleasure it won’t bring Mr Putin.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.