NO asterisk will be placed next to Andy Murray's name should he win the 2016 Wimbledon singles championships in a week's time. No footnote will be inserted into the record books to denote the fact that Novak Djokovic uncharacteristically crashed out of the competition to Sam Querrey at the third round stage, or that Rafa Nadal was sitting at home in Mallorca nursing an injured wrist, and two of the other six Grand Slam winners who started the fortnight, Stan Wawrinka and Juan Martin del Potro, were incapable of hanging around into the second week.

While the Scot has never been favoured as strongly for any Grand Slam as he is right now, this isn't completely uncharted territory. When Murray won the 2013 title here, it was widely assumed that he would face Jo Wilfried-Tsonga at the quarter final stage and Roger Federer or Rafa Nadal in the semi-finals. Instead he met the unseeded Fernando Verdasco in the quarters and the erratic young Pole, Jerzy Janowicz in the semis. It didn't exactly make the first home win of this competition for 77 years any less satisfying. Once again, Ivan Lendl is around to guide him through the pitfalls.

"I remember that made it hard in terms of everyone focusing on me from early in the tournament and I spoke with Ivan about it at the time, because it's an extra thing to deal with," said Murray yesterday. "The difference between this year and 2013 is those players were all in my section of the draw, and so their losses had quite a direct effect, whereas Novak Djokovic losing on Saturday won't have any bearing on me at all unless I reach the final."

As that fraught five-set encounter with Verdasco in 2013 proves, new threats tend to emerge as established ones fall by the wayside. Not least of these is Nick Kyrgios, the 21-year-old from Canberra, who will face the Scot on Centre Court today.

While the pair are firm friends, the Scot is wary about the match-up, perhaps because he sees a lot of younger self in the form of the 6ft4in Australian. To date, the No 16 seed has never got beyond the quarter finals at any major - due in no small measure to Murray, who defeated him in the other three slams last year - but he feels Kyrgios is destined to become a Grand Slam winner in future.

"You never know – I know how difficult these events are to win – but he will definitely give himself chances [to win slams]," said the World No 2. "He is improving all the time. He has performed, out of the younger guys, probably the best in the Slams. [Dominic] Thiem, obviously, at the French did very well but, overall, Nick has played well in Australia, has played some good stuff in Paris and also here he has been pretty consistent as well."

The World No 16, of course, is a controversial figure who regularly incurs the wrath of the tennis authorities, his latest on-court misdemeanour occurring during the first day of his third round match with Feliciano Lopez when he used the word 'retarded' to describe his own coaching entourage. Murray feels the 21-year-old is over-scrutinised by the world's media and doesn't deserve the bad rap that he gets. "Some days it [his passion] helps, some days it doesn't," said the Scot. "But long as he directs his frustration to what is happening on the court and not getting distracted by what is going on off it, it can be a positive thing.

"He is good fun," added Murray. "He chats to everyone and I have never really seen him in a bad mood off the court. Obviously on it, like I have many times and loads of players have in the past, he has made mistakes, and done stuff that is wrong. Sometimes in the press he does get a bit of a hard time and he goes on the defensive a little bit when maybe he doesn't need to but I can understand that as well.

"When you see what some of the other players have done here – players that are better than him and won a lot more than him – the coverage they get for destroying a racket is much less than he does for saying to the umpire: You have done a bad job or You were terrible today, whatever. But because it is him, it is a bigger story then they ask about it in the press."

While the two men have chatted about his behaviour, further advice will only be dispensed if the Aussie seeks it out. After his victory against John Millman, Murray is now on an 18-strong winning run against Australian players "I’ve chatted to him about it but unless someone asks me for my advice I won’t just volunteer it," he added. "I chat to him all the time about loads of stuff. A little bit about basketball. We chat a lot about tennis as well, he does love tennis, he knows a lot, maybe sometimes he says he doesn’t care that much about tennis but he does care, he does like it and knows all the players well, he knows their games and stuff. It’s not like when he goes home he just turns the TV off." Anyone doing likewise today, when a match-up like this one is available, would appear to need their heads examined.