Nobody ever seemed to have a good word to say for Ivan Lendl, though I personally enjoyed his general cool implacability. But why so disliked? It wasn’t as though he stood in the way of British tennis glory: Lendl’s career coincided with headlines that read ‘British Wimbledon hopes extinguished as Jeremy Bates loses rain-delayed first-round match’. No, we didn’t take to Lendl because he didn’t smile much and was as undemonstrative as you could get, the perfect bad guy to put in front of lovable showmen like Boris Becker, Pat Cash and Henri Leconte. Lendl was the last chip off the old Communist Bloc. If Rocky IV had been made about tennis, Dolph Lundgren would have played the baddie and he would have been called something like, er, Ivan Lendl.
What we do love in Britain is a coach, preferably a winning coach, no matter where they are from: Sven, Fabio, Duncan Fletcher, Andy Flower, Sir Clive, Sir Alex, The Special One, Jurgen Grobler. To that list we may soon be adding one Ivan Lendl. Andy Murray’s appointment of Lendl as his coach would appear to be a shrewd one, and the combination is undefeated after the Scot took the season-opening Brisbane Invitational.
They’re made for each other: Lendl may have won eight grand slams more than Murray, but early on he had a similar reputation as a bit of a choker when it came to major finals, finally winning one at the fourth attempt. Lendl found it hard to get his message across, something Murray should relate to as he finds the Dunblane drawl to be the language of both victory and defeat. The biggest similarity of all might just be their peers. Lendl turned pro in the Borg/McEnroe/Connors era and Murray has Federer, Nadal and Djokovic squabbling over the prizes he covets, not least the Australian Open which starts on Monday.
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