Andy Murray gave Great Britain a winning start in the Davis Cup and then wept on the court as he revealed he had missed his grandmother’s funeral to play.
The 36-year-old Scot received an outpouring of sympathy from a crowd of nearly 10,000 at the Manchester Arena after breaking down in front of on-court interviewer Naomi Broady immediately after the match.
Murray had just come through a 6-7 6-4 6-4 victory over Switzerland’s Leandro Riedi to put GB 1-0 up as they attempted make the finals of the competition, which takes place in November.
Later Dan Evans and Neal Skupski claimed a deciding doubles match to seal a 2-1 win, putting the host nation top of the four-team group, ahead of Sunday’s final match against France.
Nobody, seemingly not even team management, had been aware of the outside events affecting Murray until Broady drew attention to a 90-year-old lady in the crowd who was attending her first-ever live tennis match.
Immediately choked, Murray referred to the passing of grandmother Ellen, from the side of his father Willie: ‘Today is a tough day for me. It's my gran's funeral today. I'm sorry to my family that I'm not able to be there. Gran, that one's for you.’
Later the player explained: ‘I spoke to my dad about it and he said that, you know, she would want you to play. He said to make sure you win, so I did.’
He then suggested he had kept the situation to himself, knowing that there was a plan for him to come into the team to face Switzerland, who had been expected to field one of their lefthanders, either Dominic Stricker or Marc-Andrea Huesler, rather than the lower ranked Riedi.
‘I hadn't discussed that with Leon. In terms of this selection we spoke about it on Sunday,’ said Murray. ‘ My record against lefthanders is very good, and we were expecting one of them. We hadn’t spoken about Riedi until an hour before the match - it was a bit of a surprise when that changed.’
The Swiss selection nearly worked with the talented but erratic Riedi teeing off on service returns and coming close to an upset before being broken at 2-2 in the decider.
It came down to the doubles after Cam Norrie, another switch after Dan Evans and Jack Draper had both won their singles on Wednesday against Australia, was beaten 7-5 6-4 by Stan Wawrinka. Evans teamed up with Norrie to beat Wawrinka and Stricker 6-3 6-3 to put GB in a strong position to go through.
Captain Leon Smith later confirmed that he was in the dark about the outside factors involving Murray: ‘I didn't know actually,’ he said. ‘It just shows his strength of character to do what he did today. That would have been very difficult for him. What he then goes out and does - it's really quite incredible, and it was vitally important as well, what he's done for the team.’
