Jack Draper and Mika Stojsavljevic give British tennis strong end to testing year in ‘life after Andy’

As for the Lawn Tennis Association’s National Academy programme, it has certainly not become the envy of the world, as its founder Simon Timson predicted when he established it six years ago. But there have been glimpses of promise here: not only with regard to the girls mentioned above but also last year’s Wimbledon junior champion Henry Searle.

It should be said, however, that the other grand-slam nations have been upping their games sharply in recent months. Look at the ATP top 100 and you will count ten Australians, ten Frenchmen and nine Americans – all of which puts Draper’s emergence into perspective.

British tennis is all too ready to rely on a couple of marquee names – think Henman and Murray in the past, or Raducanu today – when a deeper field of contenders would represent true progress. The Academy programme may indeed have done valuable work with Stojsavljevic and Robertson, but the Stirling branch closed its doors for good in June. We have been left with only a dozen or so students in Loughborough: a small number of tickets with which to enter the tennis lottery.

Ultimately, if the scene is brightening at all, that comes down to the influence of Murray himself. He has demonstrated to everyone what can be achieved with unstinting effort. As Billie Jean King likes to say, “If you can see it, you can be it,” and everyone in the gym at the National Tennis Centre has had an up-close view of his famously punishing training sessions.

You could hear from Draper’s interviews, all the way through his breakthrough fortnight, that he is using Murray very consciously as his role model. As he said after his third-round win over Botic van der Zandschulp, “I’m full of respect and admiration for Andy. He’s gone on to achieve amazing things [and] I have it in mind that if I can just keep on going and keep on pushing myself, then I’m gonna be hopefully having the type of successes that he’s had.”

For the British game as a whole, that would certainly be the dream scenario.