ANDY Murray isn’t quite back on court at the Wimbledon championships yet. But he is back holding court in the main interview room. And, two years on from limping painfully out of that quarter final against Sam Querrey, and six months down the line from all those tearful goodbyes in Australia, that is more than enough for now.

This is the same Andy Murray, only different. Many times we have sat in that interview room and listened as the Scot outlined the perils of looking too far ahead as he plotted his path through the big hitters of men’s tennis. Twice he even managed to navigate his way past them all.

Yesterday was a strange variation on that theme, though. Forget the All-England Club, all anyone wanted to know about yesterday was a theoretical third-round all-Dunblane doubles derby which may never happen.

While the 32-year-old has played only one men’s doubles match here before, a straight-sets first-round defeat in the company of David Sherwood against Martin Damm and Mariano Hood not long after his debut here in 2005, Andy knows the score. The media’s appetite has been whetted for the notion of him taking on his brother Jamie in the third round here, he with his French partner Pierre-Hugues Herbert and Jamie with his new companion Neal Skupski. While he would rather be on the same side of the net, it would still be pretty neat to have his big brother on the other.

“I mean, even if were separated on opposite ends of the draw, people would be talking about us playing in the final,” Andy said wearily. “But we have to win matches first. I think if we get through our first round, we're due to face the No.6 seeds [Nikola Mektic and Franko Skrugor of Croatia] in the second round.

“I mean, if we play each other, it would be difficult in some respects. But you're competing against your brother in the biggest tennis event in the world. I'd rather be on the same side of the net with him. But it's cool if we did get the opportunity. We’d be doing it on the biggest stage in our sport, which would be nice. But we'll see if we get there.”

When was the last time the pair of them competed against each other? Well, they have had a sum total of one senior meeting, in Montreal in late 2015, when Andy and Leander Paes of India went down to Jamie and his Aussie partner John Peers. As you can guess from a final scoreline of 6-4, 7-6 (11-9) both this pair fought to the last. “Before that, it would have been a pretty long time,” said Andy yesterday. “Normally, when I have played doubles, most of the time it's kind of been with him recently.”

But hang on a minute. Surely, if you want to study the form guide on this one you would have to consider the wrestling they used to do as boys, not to mention makeshift table-tennis tables and every homespun sport going under the sun. Andy admits that having a big brother like Jamie to play off has made him what he is today.

“Growing up with a brother literally 15 months apart, we did all sports together, all games together from when we were kids,” he said. “Tennis-wise, in central Scotland, there wasn’t lots of top tennis players when we were growing up. So having Jamie to play against and compete against up until we were kind of 14, 15, was obviously a big help.

“I just think the biggest thing for us as athletes is that we didn't just play tennis,” he added. “ We did everything together, whether that was golf, gymnastics, squash, table tennis, swimming. We did all sports with each other at a young age and enjoyed doing it.

“That was probably the biggest thing for both of us growing up. There's a lot of transferable skills from sport to sport. We can play a reasonable level of golf together, which is good. And that came from our parents obviously allowing us to spend most of our kind of time away from school running around and letting us play sports.”

As for doubles itself, it kind of goes without saying that Andy is a fan of the team form of the sport, even if he prefers the training drills more than playing the game itself at times. “You sometimes feel like you're not hitting lots of balls,” he said. “You can be on the courts sometimes for an hour and a half, not feel like you've done a whole lot, whereas when you're doing the actual drills, you get a really intense workout.”

While he hasn’t watched “any” tennis at all in the last few months, he grew up watching doubles to an extent at a time when plenty of the best singles players also moonlighted in it. His only suggestion to get those days back is to limit doubles matches to best of three sets in the slams.

“I would never expect a top singles player to enter the doubles here because playing potentially 10 sets in one day is just too much,” said Andy. “That's something that maybe would be worth looking at, to give more value to the doubles event, to get more of the top singles players playing, is to reduce the length of the matches a bit.”

This is the same Andy Murray, only different. As happy as he is just to be back here, and un-fooled about the scale of the task in hand by his recent victory at Queen’s Club, it won’t take long for the competitive juices to start flowing.

“I'm just happy to be playing tennis again really,” said Andy, who is first pitted against Romania's Marius Copil and Ugo Humpert of France. “I didn't know four or five weeks ago if I'd even be playing over the grass. So I shouldn't be expecting too much … but once I step on the court, I'll be out there trying to win every match I play.”