IVAN Lendl shot a 10-over par total of 160 for his two rounds at the 2015 Connecticut Senior Amateur Championship, good enough for a tie for 21st place. He would have been back there right now trying to improve on that if he hadn't accepted the new job which forced him to withdraw from the event. Instead of the greens of Torrington Country Club, the Czech will be prowling around the manicured lawns of the All England Club this fortnight, plotting Andy Murray's path through the numerous hazards of the Wimbledon draw, and ensuring the Scot's bid for a second Wimbledon title remains on the straight and narrow.

To say his first week in the job has gone well is an understatement. In fact, while the team he has re-joined has a different composition from the one he left - with Jamie Delgado as full-time coach and travelling companion instead of Dani Vallverdu - it seems almost as if Lendl has never been away. The Scot made history with a record fifth title at Queen's Club, with Lendl his usual enigmatic self as he got one over on his old rival John McEnroe, now working with Milos Raonic, in the final. The only blots on the horizon are the rain clouds which a perfectionist like Lendl has been cursing for eating into their practice time.

"I would be more pleased if we had better practices at Queen’s, our first 3 or 4 practices got cut short by rain," said Lendl. "But Andy seems to be in a good place, and everybody on the team is clicking well together. It’s very similar to 2012 and 2013, I think."

How similar things are to that glorious day three years ago when Murray ended 77 years without a home winner of the men's singles at SW19 - climbing up to the players' box first to embrace Lendl, almost getting back down again before he remembered to give his mum Judy a hug - is about to become clear. More than anything, it is the chance to rekindle those memories which has brought these two men together again, a reunion which both could have stubbornly resisted.

Lendl's abiding memory of 2013 is simply how well the Scot executed their game plan on the day, and how adeptly his charge handled such stifling pressure to deliver. As much as he will strain every sinew to complete a hat-trick of career Grand Slams at this year's Championships, nothing comes close to that.

"The thing that stands out most in my mind is actually the pressure he was under," recalls Lendl, eight times a Grand Slam winner but no better than a beaten finalist, twice, at Wimbledon. "I would go out and on the street people would be saying 'I hope he can do it, I hope he can do it' and at that time I realised how different and how much bigger that pressure was, because he had already been in the final in 2012. I have experienced pressure, although I never experienced pressure on that level, so I knew what Andy was dealing with. That he was able to deal with it was beautiful to see."

From the vantage point of his living room in Connecticut, Lendl accepts that tennis in general, has evolved in the two or so years that he has been away. The main beneficiary of it has been Novak Djokovic, a man who rules by such fear in the sport that many of his opponents gift him "two or three points a set". He also feels, though, that Murray has improved, as he displays a greater level of consistency on the 'regular' events on the tour. "That makes my job easier because he comes in better prepared," said Lendl.

It is not his role to work on technique with a 29-year-old whose game is already solid enough to have taken him to countless riches and the No 2 spot in the world rankings, merely a case of enforcing patterns of play and tactics which can pay dividends against the best in the business. "I don’t do any technique, zero, I don’t believe in that at 27 or 29," said Lendl. "What you have is what you are going to have, you can groove certain things but changing technique is not where I’m going to go. A) I don’t believe you should do it at that age and B) I suck at it."

What he doesn't suck at is bringing an added hard-edged intensity to everything Murray is trying to achieve. On Sunday at Queen's Club, for instance, let's just say there wasn't too much in the way of pleasantries afterwards. "He [McEnroe] came in and said 'well done' in the locker room, we said 'thank you' and that was it," said Lendl. "There is no need to chat to other players or teams about what you thought. You chat with your player."