If last season’s Davis Cup showed his willingness to work for the British cause, Andy Murray’s defeat of Kei Nishikori answered any remaining questions about his capacity to respond to the challenge of facing top-class opposition on international team duty.

While no-one has ever won more vital Davis Cup ties in a single campaign, some reservations had been registered about the fact that he did not meet a fellow member of the world’s top 10, but both the calibre of the opponent and its courageous manner meant this victory was of a different order in individual terms.

For his part Murray placed the matter of the need for leading players to come up against one another in this team event in proper perspective immediately after his win.

“I don’t know how important it is for the competition … the competition seems to be doing just fine,” he observed, when asked about the prospect of facing world No.1 Novak Djokovic in the quarter-final.

“I don’t know what it’s like in the other ties this week but we’re filling a 9000-seat stadium and I imagine that in Serbia it would have been packed as well.

“Today’s match against Kei for everyone who came to watch was entertaining and getting the best players in the world against each other on a regular basis that’s a good thing for the sport.”

All the moreso in this instance because of what Nishikori represents as an opponent whose status in his homeland and beyond helps offer a reminder of Murray’s own in a context well beyond that of Europe.

The Davis Cup may have a strange format for a team competition, Murray having shown just how much of an influence a solitary player can have in an entire campaign with his 11-point haul, but the make-up of this year’s World Group also demonstrates just how much global reach the sport has with Asia, Australasia, both North and South America and Europe all highly competitively represented.

While Dunblane’s finest can claim to be number one in no larger a territory than the little country he represents on Davis Cup duty, then, Nishikori is not only the best player in the 10th most populous country in the world but by a vast margin in the continent that houses 60 per cent of the world’s population.

It is, too, a region that takes its racquet sport very seriously as will become ever more evident when the All England Badminton Championships take occupancy of this same building this week.

In many ways Asia is the heartland of racquet sports and if it has never yet achieved the dominance on the tennis court that it has for long periods badminton, squash and table tennis, it is not for want of profile given that before taking residency at London’s O2 Arena the season-ending ATP World Tour finals were held in Shanghai for several years.

For Murray to be better than the finest Asia can produce is, then, an alternative indicator of what he has done in this sport to simply comparing him with his European contemporaries in an period that has seen five Europeans claim all bar two of the last 44 grand slams.

Indeed one suspects that in any other era Nishikori would, like a Yevgeny Kafelnikov, Sergi Burguera or Gustavo Kuerten, have been a multiple grand slam winner, just as it is reasonable to suppose that Murray would have won many more of them.

Yet for all that becoming Britain’s best player in the post-war era was the least of the challenges facing this Wimbledon, US Open and Olympic champion, there is something wonderfully ironic in this man whose jokes about sporting affiliations and acknowledgement of nationalist inclinations caused such angst in middle England, now becoming the sportsman who is doing more than any other to help reclaim the Union Jack from the political right with his performances on Great Britain duty.

Lovely too to see such a large room full of people in the heart of Shakespeare country, singing lustily along to the British team’s unofficial anthem of ‘The Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond’ ensuring as it does that no-one is unaware of just how reliant this Davis Cup success is on Scottish input.

In these Brexit dominated days becoming European No.1, let alone shifting that one elusive place up the world rankings, seems likely to remain just beyond Andy Murray’s reach, but for all his best efforts to deny himself the opportunity, he is making the very most of being the best of British as well as one of the finest tennis players the world has ever seen.