Your Biggest Opponent Isn’t Across the Net
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At 4.05 in the morning in Melbourne, Andy Murray hit a backhand down the line, sighed, and walked to the net to embrace Thanasi Kokkinakis. Five hours and forty-five minutes. Two sets down. Two points from defeat, twice. The longest match of a very long career, finished in front of a crowd who had stayed to the end because they could not quite believe what they were watching.
Thirty-nine hours later he was back on court.
I was asked on BBC News that morning how a 35-year-old with a metal hip prepares for a third-round Grand Slam match having gone to bed at five in the morning. It is a good question, and the answer turns out to be more useful to the rest of us than it first appears.
What makes Andy Murray so mentally tough?
There is no secret, and anyone selling you one is selling you something. It is years of deliberate work on psychological strength, combined with the physical capacity to move around a court, plus maturity. Those three things together produce what people call resilience. None of them arrived in a moment.
That matters, because the way we tell these stories does a disservice to everyone watching. We describe a 4am comeback as though it were an act of will summoned on the night. It was not. It was the visible output of a great deal of invisible work, most of it done years earlier, in conditions nobody filmed.
What is “emotional temperature”, and why does it decide matches?
Emotional temperature is how hot you are running internally while you compete. When it climbs, you generate self-imposed pressure, and self-imposed pressure is the single biggest obstacle to expressing the talent you already have. The opponent across the net is rarely the problem. The one in your head usually is.
When I worked with Murray, this was the thing. He would get angry on court, and the anger was expensive. Not because anger is shameful, but because of what it does to the machinery you need in order to play well.
I should be careful here, because there is a version of this argument that is simply wrong. The goal is not calm. Yuri Hanin’s work on individual zones of optimal functioning showed decades ago that the emotional state which produces someone’s best performance is highly individual: some athletes need to run hot, and flattening them out makes them worse. Murray at absolute zero would not be Murray. The goal is not the absence of emotion. It is knowing your own optimal range and being able to return to it.
Why does emotion stop you thinking clearly?
Because attention is a finite resource, and anxiety spends it. Anxiety pulls attention towards threat and towards self-monitoring, which leaves less capacity for the thing you are actually trying to do. You can maintain performance for a while, but only by working much harder for the same output, and eventually the effort runs out.
This is the best-supported account we have. Attentional control theory, developed by Eysenck and colleagues, describes exactly this: anxiety impairs the goal-directed attentional system and hands influence to the stimulus-driven one, so your attention goes where the threat is rather than where the task is.
Which is why I describe it on air as a switch. You are either in emotional mode or in thinking mode. A tennis match is a five-hour sequence of decisions, and decisions require the thinking mode. The moment the temperature rises far enough, the decisions degrade, and in a sport of fine margins the degradation shows up on the scoreboard within two games.
You are also alone out there, which is the cruelty of tennis specifically. No substitutions, no teammate to hide behind, and long gaps between points in which the demons get a hearing: you are going to lose this, you are not as good as you thought you were. Plenty of extremely talented players never solve that, and it is the reason talent and results diverge so widely in individual sport. I saw the same pattern constantly during my years as national performance psychologist at the LTA, in players far too young to have any idea it was happening to them.
Why is a player with no fear of failure so dangerous?
Because fear of failure changes how you appraise the situation, and appraisal changes performance. A player who believes the demands exceed their resources goes into what researchers call a threat state, with measurably worse outcomes. A player who has stopped fearing the loss is free to play the ball rather than the consequence.
By 2023, Murray had not gone deep in a Grand Slam for years. There was no expectation left. He had become a father, his priorities had shifted, and he was out there because he loved the sport and still had the fight. That combination, high skill and low fear, is about as awkward an opponent as you can face.
There is a lesson in that which cuts against most of what gets said about ambition. The pressure Murray had carried for a decade was not applied by the draw. It was applied by expectation, most of it his own. Removing it did not make him less competitive. It made him harder to beat.
Can mental strength compensate for three hours’ sleep?
No, and this is where the story needs an honest ending. Murray lost to Roberto Bautista Agut in the third round. He had slept for around three hours, had blisters drained before play, and had already spent nearly eleven hours on court in the tournament. The mind was right. The body had nothing left.
The evidence on this is uncomfortably clear. Reyner and Horne tested semi-professional tennis players on five hours’ sleep against a normal night, and serving accuracy fell from 53 per cent to 37 per cent. Not strength. Not endurance. Accuracy and judgement, which are precisely the qualities you cannot afford to lose.
I said on air that morning that I could see him doing it again, and I was wrong. I would rather report that than pretend otherwise, because the correction contains the most useful idea in the whole story: psychological strength buys you access to your ability. It does not manufacture ability you have depleted.
What does this mean outside sport?
Every organisation has people running at a permanently high emotional temperature and calling it commitment. And most leadership cultures quietly reward it, because heat looks like caring.
The cost is not visible in effort. It is visible in judgement. The executive who cannot stop replaying the meeting is not thinking clearly about the next one. The team that has been at maximum intensity for a quarter is not making worse decisions because it lacks talent, but because it has no attentional capacity left to make good ones with. Under sustained threat, people narrow, defend, and stop seeing options.
Two questions are worth asking your own team, and they come directly from the Murray story.
Where is our pressure actually coming from? Almost always the answer is not the market or the client. It is expectation, much of it self-imposed and none of it examined. The performance benefit of naming that out loud is considerable, and it costs nothing.
Are we asking people to think while they are hot? Most organisations schedule their most consequential decisions immediately after their most stressful events. That is the worst possible sequencing, and it is entirely within your control to change.
And the third, which nobody wants to hear: are we treating recovery as optional? Murray on three hours’ sleep is your team in the fourth month of a project that was supposed to take six weeks. No amount of mindset work compensates. If the accuracy has gone, it has gone.
Lowering the temperature
You do not fix this with a slogan or a breathing exercise learned the week of the event. What works is unglamorous and takes time: knowing your own optimal range rather than assuming calm is the target, having a routine that returns you to it, and building the habit of noticing the rise early, while it is still cheap to correct.
Murray’s 4am win was not the product of a mindset. It was the product of years of work on the thing that had been costing him matches, done long before anyone was watching, so that it was available at four o’clock in the morning when everything else had gone.
That is what mental strength actually is. Not a performance under the lights.
The invisible work that makes the performance possible.
Roberto Forzoni is a performance psychologist with four decades in elite sport. He built the psychological support structure behind Andy Murray’s early career, is the author of the FA Guide to Psychology in Football, was National Performance Psychologist at the LTA, and has worked with eight Premier League clubs, world champions and Olympic athletes.
Speaking: Roberto delivers keynotes on performance under pressure, winning teams and the winning mindset to conferences and leadership teams. Check availability.
Working with teams and individuals: He works with organisations, leaders and individual performers on pressure, culture and sustained high performance. Get in touch.
Media: Available for comment on pressure, resilience, choking, motivation and the psychology of elite sport. Regular contributor to BBC, Sky Sports and Al Jazeera. London based, in studio, down the line or remote. Same-day response. Media enquiries.