A PLUCKY underdog throws everything he's got into a big match on a showcourt, looks good for a time and proves to be an awkward customer, but in the end has to concede defeat to superior power.

You know the movie. We used to see it every year at Wimbledon, with a Briton in the role of the underdog, and one of the big guns putting him in his place.

Are we nostalgic for it? Not a bit, but Mikhail Kukushkin managed to forcibly remind us of it from time to time before eventually bowing out in straight sets to Andy Murray.

Perhaps the biggest compliment to be paid to the man from Kazakhstan is that at moments it was hard to tell him and his opponent apart. Kukushkin is more slightly built, but with both wearing white caps to keep out the sun, and groaning when making shots, the resemblance was more than passing - especially when Kukushkin produced some passing shots that rivalled Murray's for quality.

For a while, throughout the first set and the opening stretch of the second, this was as relaxed as it gets for a British crowd on Centre Court. No real tension, and certainly none of the nervous anticipation we used to get in the Tim Henman days. Back then, middle England hoped against hope that their man would make the breakthrough and at least get to the final. Now, Scotland Expects - and Murray delivers.

Centre Court was barely two-thirds full as the players came on court unexpectedly early thanks to the rapidity with which Roger Federer wrapped up his match, but by the time the warm-up was over and the first-round match began it was close to capacity once more. Even so, the crowd remained almost eerily quiet as the No 3 seed took charge of the first set, with only isolated cries of "Come on, Andy!" - and thankfully not a squeak of "Come on, Tim!" - punctuating the polite applause. Indeed, at one stage it was so quiet that you could easily hear the cheer from Court 12 as Heather Watson wrapped up her win against Caroline Garcia.

The most animated any spectator got for the first half-hour or so was when someone shouted out "Let's do this, Andy!", and you wondered why, in such heat, a man should choose to expend his energy by saying such a thing. Did he think Andy was undecided about whether to "do it" or not? Perhaps he feared the Scot was on the verge of thinking "Sod this for a game of soldiers, I'm away to start a new life as a pork butcher in Lowestoft".

Having opted to shun East Anglia and stay in SW19, Murray wrapped up the first set, but then made a meal of the second on a sweltering day when you would far rather have had a snack of a match. Still, he has a handy way of getting himself out of a scrape, which basically consists of becoming so riled with himself that he rediscovers the aggression required to kill off an awkward foe.

They used to say that scoring against Brazil only made them angry - or at least that's what they said at the 1982 World Cup when David Narey's goal provoked them into scoring four of their own against Scotland. Murray's trick is to make himself angry, usually after he has fallen short of his own high standards for a game or two.

He had to do that to secure the second set, in which he led 3-0 then 4-2 before failing to serve out at 5-3. Racing to a 6-1 lead in the tiebreak, he momentarily threatened to indulge in another mini-slump when he conceded two set points, but then decided he's had enough.

The third set was similar. Murray went up a break up, Kukushkin evened things out, and in the end the 2013 champion had to dig deeper to take it than we would have expected during that tranquil beginning to the match. With temperatures on court inching above 40 degrees, a match that took more than an hour longer than Federer's - two hours 12 minutes compared to 1:08 - might be classed as unnecessary exertion.

But at this stage you play the opponent in front of you, not the one you might meet sometime next week. And Murray played Kukushkin well enough, ensuring that those dips in form did no more than mildly delay his progress into the second round.