There’s nothing we old folk like more than a chat about how poorly all our friends and acquaintances are. This is because, as anyone who understands the complex workings of the universe knows, there is only a certain amount of ill health to go round and the more it lands on someone else, the better our chances of dodging a bullet. It’s the same with tennis: there’s only a certain number of classic matches available for any one tournament.

At this year’s Wimbledon the tennis gods poured all the juice into the wondrous Djokovich/Del Potro semi-final, which was one of most thrilling, athletic and noble sporting contests I have ever seen. Its full magnificence was slightly lost in the euphoria over Murray’s subsequent passage to the final with victory over the hulking Jerzy boy. But the tennis deities are implacable, which meant that the final, epochal and historic as it was, could never be a great match. It was disjointed and lacked the ebb and flow of the greatest games.

Djokovich, charming as ever, was slightly under par, but he is such a gent he would never say anything even if he’d been up all night with gastroenteritis, had dislocated his shoulder and been chucked by his girlfriend. ‘The better man won, well played Andy,’ he would say — and indeed he did.

This was an extraordinary victory for Murray, but not at all unexpected. He is imperiously the best player in the world (bar one). In the last four Grand Slams he has entered, he has appeared in the final of all of them, winning two. He has transformed his body, and now, thanks to Ivan Lendl, his mind. In the end nothing would stand in his way. To me, Murray is one of the two greatest sportsmen Britain has ever produced, the other being Sir Roger Bannister. But Bannister had his team of brilliant middle distance athletes backing him up, and he was part of a long continuum of British distance running. Murray has done it all on his own.

Look at it this way: the superhumanly coiffured Fernando Verdasco, Murray’s five-set opponent in the quarter-finals, was then rated the ninth-best tennis player in Spain. The nearest rated British player to Murray is well outside the top 200. The Scotsman’s solitary achievement in scaling these sporting heights is breathtaking and he deserves any and every honour the British state throws at him, though hopefully not too soon.

Having spent most of the last two weeks in a hospital room, I watched a great deal of Sky’s warm-up to the climax of the Lions tour, which consisted mainly of running Living with the Lions, the film of the 1997 tour to South Africa, on a more or less continuous loop. The fact that I could watch the match itself in some comfort is thanks entirely to the brilliance of my surgeon, Parthi Srinivasan at London Bridge hospital, who is widely regarded as the Leigh Halfpenny of his field, not because of his skill with the place kick, but because he is sheer perfection in the operating theatre. My  eternal gratitude to him and his staff.

But the ’97 Lions film is like something from another age, the age before science kidnapped sport, before Dave Brailsford at Sky Pro Cycling, and the development of marginal gains, before Moneyball, metrics, physios, shrinks, and dieticians. The pre-match meetings all seemed fabulously unsubtle: ‘This is all about the jersey, just get fucking stuck in, just fucking boss them.’ It can’t still be like that, can it? Does Pep Guardiola give team talks like that? I honestly don’t know. But maybe it is all about the jersey, and always will be. It certainly was in Sydney. So, what’s the German for ‘Let’s be having you’?