So he didn't do it ...

... but, fuck, he came close.

Maybe it might have been different if Murray had held his lead in the first game of the third set, or if he'd taken that set point. The Union may well crumble, even if he does win next year. But he should not be ashamed. He should take no heed to those who will bash him as a "loser" or a "choker". Murdoch need not bother him. It was a great match, and he could have done no better.

A satisfying humiliation for Little Englanders

If Murray is going to win, he really will have had to fight for it. And it is precisely because, unlike Henman, he understands what fighting actually is - and doesn't think, not even in some unthinking mental background, that there is something faintly vulgar about it - that he could fight and win on this most exhausting of nights.

A little bit of Old England died tonight, and all I felt was the drama of sport at its very best, and final elation. Those whose petty little bigotry is infinitely more likely to break the Union than Murray ever will have been definitively defeated. You will never hear Cliff Richard on that ancient turf again. We did get 15 seconds or so of "Sporting Occasion", but we needed no more - and in context it worked, because here was a moment when the worst of the past was put behind us, not - as so often - the best.

I am not saying the Union has to stay together for this reason alone, but those in England outside the southern middle class have - I think - mostly realised that Murray's experiences and attitudes have far more in common with theirs than Henman's ever could have. By Sunday night, something might have happened which could have significance way beyond tennis. Or maybe it's too far gone. But this was a victory to stir even the harshest heart.

The Daily Mirror really shouldn't try to do political history

Monday's edition claimed, in a desperate Andy Murray / Gordon Brown / let's-desperately-try-and-keep-the-Union-together-and-make-it-possible-for-Labour-to-eventually-get-back-in puffpiece, that "the blow to national pride" of England's defeat in the quarter-final of the 1970 World Cup against West Germany "was blamed on" Harold Wilson's election defeat.

Perhaps poor syntax on the part of the writer, but quite apart from the unlikely scenario of footballers' performances seriously being affected by an election result (and anyway, quite a few of them, even pre-Thatcher, would surely have been the sort of working-class-boys-made-good who voted Tory because they thought Labour would put them back where their fathers had been?) the slightest research could have told them that the match was played four days before the election, and that Wilson's defeat was blamed by many at the time and since on England's.

They really ought to stick to dredging up the Madeleine McCann episode and putting it on their front page when at least all their rivals are leading on this year's shitstorm ...