• Paris Masters

Resurgent Murray channels power of proving people wrong

Andy Murray has been pumped up throughout an excellent run since the US Open © Getty Images

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There are few pleasures more sublime than proving everyone else wrong. Being right is all very well so far as it goes, but you need other people to be wrong if you want to give the whole thing a little Tabasco. And that's one of sport's many little joys: there are so many opportunities to watch people being wrong.

I remember heading towards a showjumping ring after a profound disagreement between myself and my horse in the practice arena. My trainer's far-carrying voice rang out: "You'll never get round!" Inevitably, we rode a blinder, because proving people wrong is not only a pleasure in itself, it is also one of the most powerful motivators in sport, or for that matter, life. As my trainer well knew.

Which brings us to a somewhat higher level of sport and Andy Murray. What fun he's been having in recent weeks. It's as if he had my old trainer in his ear. Because another of sport's pleasures is writing people off.

London calling

Andy Murray has secured his place at the ATP Tour Finals in London despite a turbulent year © AP

• Murray's record: Aug 5, 2013-Sep 19, 2014
• Played: 66
  Won: 48
  Lost: 18
  Win %: 76
  
  Murray's record: Sep 22, 2014-Oct 30, 2014
• Played: 20
  Won: 18
  Lost: 2
  Win %: 90
  

You know how it goes: the legs have gone, he just hasn't got in anymore. She was never the same after the injury. It was that defeat, it did his head in, he was never quite top class afterwards. It was that fall. It wasn't the injury, he just lost his nerve.

And Lord knows there were enough reasons to write Murray off. The first was not defeat but victory. When he won the men's singles at Wimbledon and became the first Brit to do so for 77 years, it was rather more than a man winning a tennis tournament: and rather more than a personal milestone. It was an achievement at national level, one that united the country in mingled relief and joy.

So how do you follow that? You have fulfilled the entire purpose of your life: your own ambition is slaked and so is that of the entire nation. There is always a sense of let-down in victory: in this case of supreme triumph, you could hardly have blamed Murray if he had vowed never to pick up a racquet again. After all, he had given us enough.

This all-consuming world-shattering triumph was followed by back surgery. These days we are all pretty blasé about operations for athletes: they happen all the time and the people who perform them are pretty damn good at it. A generation or so back, a ruptured cruciate ligament was the end of a career, and probably the end of walking comfortably as well. These days athletes in all sports not only return from a cruciate op, they generally do so within the year. We are accustomed to think of sporting surgery as a relatively minor inconvenience to an athlete.

But Murray's back surgery was always going to be a long business. It's not just a question of physical recovery. It takes time to learn to trust your new back enough to go all out: to play free from anxiety, pain and inhibition.

All the same, when Murray sank to 12th in the world rankings after a desperately disappointing show in the US Open, it seemed pretty clear that it was time to write him off for the rest of the year at the very least. What Wimbledon had started his back had completed. He was a player in decline: perhaps terminally.

Now Murray happens to be a glutton for adversity. He has a real taste for a difficult situation. He trains like a maniac. The business of struggle is the breath of life to him. Not for him the nonchalant superiority of Roger Federer in his prime: Murray has always enjoyed slumming for victory, going into the abysmal depths of personality in the search for triumph.

And to suggest that he likes proving people wrong is to suggest that Richard Burton liked a drink. Proving people wrong may not be the entire purpose of his life, but it's provided a singularly helpful structure to his career. As a teenager he decamped to Spain to better himself and to prove the Lawn Tennis Association wrong. He has spent the last six weeks in glorious defiance, proving everybody wrong with every match he has played.

For the first time since 2005 he has played six successive tournaments, revelling in his own refound fitness and his own glorious defiance. This week in Paris he qualified for the end of year championship, in which only the top eight players in the world compete. It takes place at the 02 in London and just about every observer of the game had said Murray had no chance of making it.

In the course of the run - and prior to his meeting with Novak Djokovic in the Paris Masters quarter-finals - he has played 20 matches, won 18 of them and picked up three ATP titles as he did so. It has been a sustained detonation of brilliance. At his best he has played with a swaggering, far-reaching confidence: look out, world, I'm back. Whatever happens in the rest of season he will go into 2015 with a real bounce in his step and a ranking that is not only worthy of his talents but will also give him a better draw in the Grand Slam tournaments.

I remember how Sebastian Coe won his 1500 metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympic Games in 1980 in the manner of a frightened gazelle - and then, after everyone had written him off, he won the same event at the Los Angeles Games four years later in the manner of a ravening hyena. When he had done so he roared: "Who says I'm f***ing finished?"

The same glorious spirit has powered Murray through six weeks of utter splendour, proving one of the age-old truths of sport and life: that you can knock people down but sometimes they get up again. And that sometimes all you have to do is write them off - and that will lift them to the greatest heights of brilliance they are capable of reaching.

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