‘Ivan is the best coach I’ve had,’ Murray tells me, without hesitation. ‘Because in sport you base how good someone is on results, and the results I had with Ivan were the best. At the time I had never won a grand slam. Ivan had been through a lot of the same things that I had, and speaking to someone like him, someone who seemed to be incredibly strong and mentally tough, it was good to know he felt sick before grand-slam finals and had failed many times.
‘He lost 11 grand-slam finals. I have lost eight, which I would rather not have done, but there are better players than me who have lost more. It was good to have someone like that who could normalise failing, make it OK to lose, rather than it just being like, “Oh this is a disaster.” With Ivan, it was all about learning from mistakes, learning from losses.
‘I lost to Novak in the first slam that I was with him, in 2012 at the Aussie Open. We sat down the next day and he said, “I know you probably don’t want to do this today because it was a brutal match and stuff, but I’m not doing my job correctly if I don’t tell you what I think you did wrong and what you can do to improve.” Not many coaches had done that before after tough losses.’