THE manner in which Andy Murray earned the right to compete with the rest of the tennis elite next week brought to mind a piece of research that was recently brought to my attention.

"If you want to win, let it all out," was the headline on a study, published in the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, which examined the effect in endurance sport of suppressing emotions.

Conducted by Dr Chris Wagstaff, of the University of Portsmouth, it claims to have found strong evidence that burying feelings results in poorer performance. "Sports people frequently have to control their emotions in the run-up to and during competition, but this appears to significantly reduce the level at which they perform," Wagstaff contends. "Their thought processes are diminished, they put in less effort and they feel more tired than when they aren't asked to hide what they're feeling.

"We all know the feeling of having to sometimes hide our thoughts and feelings. It can make us feel exhausted and, because sportspeople operate in a result-driven goldfish bowl, the demands for suppression are particularly high. To protect sporting performance, it's important that those who manage and organise sportspeople should avoid exposing them to tasks which demand emotion regulation close to competing."

From a personal perspective the conclusions are particularly interesting because of the potential impact on the relationship between participants and media.

"Sports organisations impose chronic expectations and requirements for emotional suppression on performers, such as being overly optimistic about chances of success, being supportive of under-performing leaders, or being friendly to fans and forthcoming with media, but there is a cost in terms of performance," says Wagstaff.

No doubt the spin doctors will seize upon that as evidence of why they need to protect their precious charges even more from scrutiny and the truth is that, particularly in the build-up to major competitions, we in the press must accept that there is a case for it.

However, what I believe is much more damaging is what I have long referred to as 'personality-sapping media training' to which sportspeople are subjected, that fills their heads with things they must not say and, indeed, things they must, by way of thanking all the relevant funders, even those who are merely allocating public money.

In terms of how this was measured, the example cited in the press release I received was truly vile: sportspeople had been invited to watch a video in which a woman throws up and then eats her own vomit, with some asked to suppress their emotions and others allowed to react as they wished.

In training sessions conducted immediately thereafter, those who let it all out, so to speak, performed as they normally would. Those who bottled it up struggled.

"It is notable that those asked to suppress their emotions had a significantly lower maximum heart rate. This appears to indicate that people who are suppressing emotion are less willing or less able to put their all into the task. They also feel more tired, even though they had put in less effort," notes Wagstaff who believes his findings support and significantly extended previous research on the impact of self-regulation on physical action.

"It appears to be possible that increasing demands on sports people to suppress their emotions leads to an overload. Those forced to suppress their emotions become less able to control their emotions and the end result is someone who has poor personal relationships and who is not good at managing conflict."

Wagstaff believes his research offers insight into a wide array of the ills that blight - in particular but by no means exclusively - professional sport, run as it increasingly is by management control freaks. "To compound the problem further, a failure to self-regulate is linked to violence, doping, substance abuse and cheating," he says, in relation to the way that sportspeople are increasingly told how to behave at all times.

As with all such matters, there are different ways of interpreting them and those who do not approve of outbursts of emotion might argue that self-regulation equates to self-control and that, by keeping his feelings in check, Murray and others would do themselves, as well as their sports, greater service.

For my money, though, this is one of the rare examples of a need for sports administrators to impose themselves more effectively.

Obviously it is a bad thing if we stop wanting to bring youngsters to watch the best in sport because we fear that in the confined space of a tennis court they will be exposed to expletive laden rants by those they hero worship.

There is, then, a case for hefty punishments to be imposed on those issuing audible obscenities, albeit that may require the recruitment of linguists to ensure fair play all round, in which case those whose failure to self-regulate goes beyond what is deemed acceptable, would pay the price.

As to the emotional side of it, the message to Scotland's all-time greatest sportsman as a result of this research would seem to be clear.

The honesty in the way you express yourself on court is doing you the world of good, Andy, and, off it, just keep getting it all out of your system, even if some of what is asked of you makes you sick . . .