An article published this week by sports psychologist Misha Botting laid out the basic ingredients required when looking to establish team dynamics.

Discussing what is much more an art form than a science British Curling’s sports psychologist explains that he builds his thought processes around a series of essential questions:

• Why do we need to spend time and energy to build a particular team dynamic?

• What will make our team more effective and tighter as a unit?

• What will help us to cope better with successes and setbacks?

• How do we create a team environment where every player is capable of getting the best out of themselves in training and transferring their shot-making ability to matches?

The real key to identifying the right answers lies in having the capacity to understand what best works with the particular combination of individuals involved, and that inevitably varies from group to group.

Where team sports have a huge advantage on the field of play as compared with individual sports is, however, that if trust and confidence is generated by getting the answers to those questions right, the opportunity to achieve on any given day is maximised.

After all, no one is at his or her best in every moment of every match, so it is vital that team dynamics are such that participants can recognise which of their colleagues is on or off form and can compensate for that, while encouraging them to regain it.

From that perspective we are left to wonder about the impact of Cristiano Ronaldo’s post-match attack on the attitude of Iceland when accusing them of having “a small mentality” because they had the audacity to celebrate after claiming a draw in their first ever match at the European Championship finals and suggesting “that’s why they’ll do nothing”.

Setting aside what the Icelanders have already achieved in simply being at the tournament, just what will the Portugal captain’s team-mates make of such churlishness which piles pressure on them after a night in which they had bailed him out? There are many high-class players in that Portugal team who have, for years, had to subjugate their own egos to that of Ronaldo. That he once again felt compelled to find a way of making himself the centre of attention may not play that well.

Team dynamics are also worth thinking about in the context of this week’s encouraging news of Andy Murray being reunited with the man who was in his corner when he achieved the greatest successes of his career to date.

What was striking about the way he initially got together with Ivan Lendl was that the Czech seemed to have been identified because of his capacity to understand what the player was going through.

That Lendl had lost four Grand Slam finals, just as Murray had done when he appointed him, meant the Scot had one of his sport’s all-time greats to work with who knew what it took to deal with the self-doubt that must inevitably be generated by such a succession of near misses. They are the only players in the open era to have won a first Grand Slam in a fifth appearance in a final.

Now, if we include the Olympics which provided Murray with his crucial breakthrough, he has appeared in a total of 11 major finals, winning three of them. Lendl, who played in an era before tennis was involved in the Olympics, won his fourth Grand Slam title in his 11th final, so once again there are parallels to be drawn in terms of shared experience.

In some ways it seems almost to have been a bonus that Lendl was able to let the tirades Murray regularly directs towards his support team wash over him. Many competitors are guilty of on-field behaviour that is completely out of character in any other situation, and while Murray – who has revelled in representing Great Britain in both the Davis Cup and the Olympics – cannot receive any on-court help from team-mates, he has, over time, built a group of people around him who understand that none of this is personal and that it is merely an outlet for frustration or irritation.

With tiny margins making the difference at the highest level, given that Murray has now demonstrated his capacity to claim big wins against career-long rival Novak Djokovic on all three surfaces that Grand Slams are played on – hard court at the US Open in 2012, grass at Wimbledon in 2013 and clay at this year’s Italian Open, he has proven himself fit enough and skilful enough, suggesting that the only difference may be psychological.

With Lendl providing at least a match for Murray’s strength of personality, slight adjustments can, as sports psych Botting put it, make for more effective and tighter collective input, helping gain maximum benefit from training in order to transfer shot-making ability into matches.

Even in an individual sport, team dynamics have the capacity to make a vital difference.