ANDY MURRAY is used to having a nation behind him, especially when he plays at home, but today at Queen's Club, he will be in the unusual position of seeing a familiar face plotting his downfall.
Jamie Delgado, a former English player who made it as high as No.121 in the rankings, has been working with Gilles Muller of Luxembourg for just over a year.
It's a combination that has yielded a career-best ranking of No.32, which Muller achieved back in February, and one that helped Muller upset the defending champion Grigor Dimitrov in the Aegon Championships here yesterday.
Last year, Muller and Delgado played together at Wimbledon but today, Delgado will have his coach's hat on, trying to figure out how the big-serving Muller can beat the world No.3 on arguably his best surface.
Murray and Delgado, who played one Davis Cup match together in 2006, have been good friends for many years and the Scot has been impressed with Muller's progress under the guidance of his old pal.
"Jamie is very knowledgeable about the game," Murray said. "He loves tennis. He's obviously been on the Tour himself for a long time. He's done a very good job with Gilles.
"Gilles was coming back from an injury when they started together, but he got him up to his career-high ranking or helped get him there."
Seeing Delgado on the side of the court but not supporting him might be a bit odd for Murray at first, but having won all three of their meetings, including one earlier this year, Murray will be confident of making it through to the last four.
Yesterday, he never really needed to get out of second gear as he eased past Fernando Verdasco 7-5, 6-4 in a match that was never in doubt, despite the apparent closeness of the score.
What might make Murray think a bit is the serve of the left-handed Muller, who hammered 37 aces in his first-round match and another 19 in an even better win yesterday against Dimitrov.
"I will definitely need to make sure I start a bit sharper than I have in the last couple of matches, because I played a couple of sloppy service games early on. When you start playing against the big servers, you can't really afford that."
Should Murray get past Muller, another big-server could be waiting after John Isner beat Feliciano Lopez 7-6, 6-7, 7-6 in a match containing 67 aces.
Murray also had some good advice for those who might be expecting Laura Robson to hit the ground running when she makes her comeback this weekend in Eastbourne after 17 months out with a wrist injury.
The Scot has had his own wrist troubles - in 2007 he had to miss Wimbledon because of it - and yesterday he warned that Robson would almost certainly take time to find her best form, physically and mentally.
"When you haven't played for 17 months, obviously she's going to be extremely rusty, probably be lacking confidence in movement, body," he said.
"There is a lot of mental baggage that she will have to deal with when she comes back.
"But if she can get over that hurdle and trust her body - which is going to take some time and some matches - and [if] she trains hard, surrounds herself with the right people and does all the right things, she can have a fantastic career, I'm sure.
"But it's going to take time for her to come back from this. If somehow she does do it quickly, that would be obviously awesome, but I wouldn't expect that."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article