WHAT a lot there is to do before the first ball is struck at Wimbledon on Monday.

For a start, there are 112,000 punnets of strawberries to be assembled, glasses washed for 200,000 servings of Pimm's, towers of towels to be folded, and Cliff Richard tied to a chair lest he want to sing during a rain break. Vital as these things are to a successful Wimbledon fortnight, for some of us nothing will assume more importance than what might be called the tennis test.

Like Norman Tebbit's cricket test, the tennis test asks the watching public whether or not they will be cheering for Andy Murray to win. Will England, Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom join as one in their backing for the world number two, or will the unity last only as long as he is winning? Is 2013, in short, the year Wimbers learns to love Andy?

A poll this week by market research firm Consumer Intelligence showed that 64% of Britons were backing Murray. Break that down further, and a more nuanced picture emerges. In Scotland, support is running at 76%, but in London it is 58%. Asked who they believe will win, 30% go for Nadal and 24% for Murray. Admittedly, the CI survey is not an official poll on attitudes towards the Scots, but looked at from left field it is a telling, even troubling, commentary on where we stand today. If any other country boasted a sportsman of the stature of Murray, support could be expected to be near universal. In this disunited kingdom, however, that is not the case, and we should be wondering why.

Someone else who is pondering the nature of national identity is our own First Minister, Alex Salmond. In what is correctly billed as a rare print interview, this one granted to The New Statesman, that well-known Scottish publication (was it something we said, First Minister?), Mr Salmond says there is more to his nationalism than meets the eye.

"One of the great attractions of Scottish nationalism is that it's very much a multi-layered identity. It's never been sensible to tell people they have only one to choose.

"I'm not sure what the Scottish equivalent of the cricket test would be. I've got a British aspect to my identity. Scottishness is my primary identity but I've got Britishness and a European identity."

That's a lot of psychological passports to carry, especially by a man who once tried to introduce the word "Scolympians" to the language rather than use the phrase Team GB.

So here we have not one but two possible candidates for the post of ambassador for a modern Scotland. Never mind Murray versus Nadal, where do we stand on Murray versus Salmond as the best, most fitting, representative of Scotland today?

As every year proves, Murray still has a mound to climb before he is held in unalloyed affection among the English press. He has been called surly, dour, temperamental, and if Scotland had a pound for every time the Wodehouse ray of sunshine quote had been dug up there would be no need for oil. He still probably rues to this day making that joke about supporting "anyone but England" in the 2006 World Cup.

Just as his ranking has changed – he was 44th in the world then – so he has risen in the affections of the doubters. Any resemblance between the two facts is surely a wild coincidence (for the avoidance of any doubt, that was a joke). The biggest turning points were his winning the Olympic gold and losing last year's Wimbledon final.

By crying and celebrating in equal measure, he cast off the caricature that so many commentators had foisted upon him, and Scots in general down the years. The dour, apparently unfeeling Scot was now a young man of flesh and blood and substance. Since then, he hasn't put a training shoe-clad foot wrong. At the final of the Aegon Championships at Queen's last Sunday he topped off a victory with a charity tennis match in which he and Tim Henman took on Ivan Lendl (Murray's coach) and Tomas Berdych.

With the crowd laughing along, Murray could not have had a warmer reception had he popped up to conduct Land of Hope and Glory at the last night of the Proms. If he cannot summon up mass support in England on this form, then this united kingdom really does have problems.

But it is not Murray's job to be an ambassador for Scotland, and he is about as keen to become involved in the independence debate as a cat is of swimming Loch Lomond. That he finds himself the centre of a tennis test every year is a reflection, and a poor one at that, of politicians' inability to lead the debate in a way that fires the public imagination. With neither the Yes nor the No camp engaging the vast majority, it is left to a young tennis player to sum up the state of play between the nations.

Like two amateurs playing a grudge match, the Yes and No camps continue to whack the ball back and forth across the net, not realising that the bored spectators have gone home hours ago. Even the introduction of new players in the debate fails to change the outlook.

The latest of these is William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, who was in Edinburgh yesterday to issue yet another warning about the price of going it alone. Apparently we'd have to "start again" in world affairs, building embassies out of old crisp packets and chewing gum while holding the door shut against hordes of terrorists. One paraphrases, but by now we all know the pantomime-like drill of "it will be a disaster" followed by "oh no it won't." New balls, new tactics, please.

On that score, at least, it is heartening to see Mr Salmond breaking his print silence. According to his interview, we learn that the current back and forth is the "phony war". The real game hasn't even started, says the First Minister. "We are just clearing the ground".

Fighting talk indeed. Likening the no camp to Count Dracula in a Hammer horror, he predicts it will crumble once exposed to daylight. Funny, they say the same about the "Yes" case.

Perhaps in fumbling towards a more nuanced definition of his identity, Mr Salmond is stumbling towards the real heart of the matter, that this debate will not be settled by the trading of statistics alone, and that it is about much more, some of it we have not even begun to touch on.

It is about tennis tests, about where you feel you belong, what country best serves your emotional, economic, and most other needs.

Whatever the Everest of strawberries at Wimbledon, regardless of how much Pimm's is consumed, a tennis tournament won't serve up the answers to those questions. Come on Andy, of course, but come on the politicians as well. Murray has raised his game to the point of possibly winning Wimbledon; it is time for politicians to do the same in the independence debate.