The new shoes, machismo and tactics behind the Murray-Djokovic alliance ...Middle East

MELBOURNE — When Novak Djokovic starts his Australian Open bid against American wildcard Nishesh Basavareddy on Monday, he will do so with Andy Murray sitting in the players’ box after a week spent having the Brit whip him into shape for the first major of the year.

As a player, Murray would vent his mid-match frustrations at his coaches with such vitriol that one – former world No 1 Amelie Mauresmo – took to watching his matches from secret locations in the stadium, just to get out of the firing line.

The locker room is awash with talk of how Murray will react to getting a taste of his own medicine, but Murray says he will not resort to such extreme tactics as Mauresmo did if Djokovic, a similarly emotional on-court character, starts shouting at him.

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“Of course, I’ve thought about it,” Murray told reporters in Melbourne.

“I would think that I’d be one of the people that would maybe hopefully understand that side of things.

“I know it’s not easy out there, and it’s stressful, and at times he’s going to want to vent towards his team and his box. Providing that he’s giving his best effort and trying as hard as he can, I’m absolutely fine with him expressing himself how he wants.”

You might say of Murray that the shoe is all of a sudden on the other foot. And actually it is almost literally true. Throughout his career, Murray wore Under Armour shoes because they featured a carbon plate that supported his troublesome big toe. (It has since been diagnosed as arthritic.)

But now he is on court merely in a coaching capacity, he is wearing a pair of Asics trainers, which bear Djokovic’s logo on the heel and name on the tongue. He does not, like the rest of Djokovic’s team, dress head to toe in Lacoste, but it is a telltale sign of Murray’s commitment to the cause.

It goes beyond footwear too. Murray has clearly thought deeply about his role within the team, where he is very much the newcomer, and about what sort of coach he wants to be.

“I think you have to be very careful with emotional players, to stop them from doing that, or stop them feeling like they’re able to if they need to,” he added.

“Sometimes suppressing everything is also not the right way.”

That emotional side of tennis has oft been neglected, especially in the men’s game, where machismo trumps meditation (something Djokovic does daily but has yet to drag his new coach into).

But coaching one of tennis’s great spiritualists, who spends his days off hugging trees in the botanical gardens, Murray was always going to have to think about the softer side of the game.

“In many ways, we are quite similar characters, so I would hope I would empathise with him on the court when he’s finding it stressful or whatever, understanding those emotions, I can help with that,” Murray said.

“And if it was something I did longer term, I would hope I would improve as a coach as well: understanding when to speak, when to shut up, how best to communicate with him and his team.”

Murray and Djokovic, born just a week apart, go way back.

They first teamed up in Australia 19 years ago to play doubles as mop-haired teenagers, and could not possibly have predicted then that they would play four Australian Open finals against each other, all won by Djokovic, less still that one might end up coaching the other.

They might not have talked about their childhood then, either, but their formative years, while on the face of it wildly different, contained a shared trauma.

The chatty, intense Andy Murray looks like a perfect coach for Novak Djokovic

Djokovic grew up in Belgrade and Murray in the central belt of Scotland, two quite different places, but both experienced serious trauma at an early age.

The Serbian spent weeks dodging Nato bombing raids and practicing on shrapnel-covered courts.

When Murray was a similar age, he was on his way to the school gym when Thomas Hamilton broke into Dunblane primary school armed with four handguns and 700 rounds of ammunition, murdering 16 children.

Both men rarely discuss the harrowing events of their early childhood, but there is little doubt it has shaped the men they are today.

Murray’s appetite for instruction is only matched by Djokovic’s desire to improve.

“At times it’s very enjoyable. But high performance is not supposed to be like laughs and jokes and messing around. It isn’t about that,” Murray said.

“In all the times I’ve been on tour, I haven’t seen that from any of the best players in the world. I’ve seen it from some of the lower ranked players, and that’s one of the reasons why they’re not there.

“The best players take it seriously and they want to improve, and it’s not always easy.”

The rewards, he insists, outweigh the pain, and the breakthroughs on the practice court excite him.

It is unsurprising that Murray takes training quite so seriously when you consider his most successful coach was the stony-faced Ivan Lendl.

Lendl, though, was a man of punishingly few words.

But Murray seemed to thrive more off his presence than anything else.

The pair would never sit down for dinner together because Lendl prefers to eat at around 5pm and then shut up shop for the night, and on court, the latter rarely uttered more than a few sentences.

In that sense, Murray has departed from his former head coach’s style, although he understands the power of silence too.

“If it was something I did longer term, I would hope I would improve as a coach as well: understanding when to speak, when to shut up, how best to communicate with him and his team.”

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Coaching, of course, is not all about talking, especially in the modern era.

When he was still playing, Murray had access to the LTA’s team of data scientists, wherever he was in the world.

Mark Hilton, one of his long-time coaches, would fire off a volley of WhatsApp messages to the Roehampton base, and be sent back a brief presentation on whatever he needed – but not all of it would be fed back to Murray.

“Often it’s just trying to cut out the noise a little bit and give some absolutes,” Hilton says.

“Depending on the player, you don’t really want to be going in there with information which could be challenged in big moments.

“The obvious one from my perspective, working with Andy, is making sure you going in there with clear and not too much information, because someone like him would want a lot.

“It will come through me, and I have to be very careful on what to go with. So often, there will be a lot of back and forth to give us some clear examples of this and some good visuals of that.

“Andy’s mid-match analysis is probably the key driver of why that relationship has come about.

“He’ll have an influence on training, but he’s another pair of eyes pre-match.”

Murray says one advantage he has over other coaches is that he has only just stopped playing.

Much of Hilton’s tactical information is still fresh in his encyclopaedic tennis memory.

The great Novak Djokovic debate of 2025

“I played against a lot of these guys,” Murray explains.

“I know what the speed of their serve is like, what the topspin on their shots are like, and hopefully have a decent understanding of their strengths and weaknesses.

“I’ve spoken about it a lot, but I think lots of people who watched me play, is that the understanding of the game and the strategy and the tactical side of things was a strength of mine.

“Hopefully, as a coach, I’m able to see the game through Novak’s eyes and help him with the right strategy on the court.”

Lendl used to say that Murray was one of the few players damaged by the lifting of the ban on coaching during matches, because it took away some of the advantage he had of being able to coach himself.

“Andy’s always been a great sort of tactician, and this is very much more coaching rather than teaching,” former British No 1 Tim Henman tells The i Paper.

”For Djokovic, at his age, yes, it’s easy to talk about winning his 25th slam, and that’s the motivation.

“But actually when you get back to the day-to-day grind of the practice courts and the gym, having fresh input and someone like Andy in your corner, I think could be very motivating.”

But for all Djokovic’s hard work, Murray said this week that he had been surprised by how work he had to put in.

Not that he is shying away from it, but more that it has given him a greater appreciation for what extra work was going on within his own team without him necessarily knowing about it.

Once matches start, that is likely to get worse.

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“I heard from everyone that it’s pretty stressful to be in the box,” said world No 5 Daniil Medvedev, widely regarded as the tour’s best tactical brain now Murray has retired.

“In a way, you cannot control what your player is doing there. It’s a much tougher feeling. I can feel it when I play team competitions.

“You really want your teammate to win. When he misses, you’re like, ‘C’mon, do better.’ It’s not the same when you’re on the court.”

It doesn’t seem likely that will put him off his coaching journey, though.

He admitted that when he was presenting the Djokovic job to his wife, a selling point was the fact he is unlikely to still be playing in five or six years.

But there seems little doubt in his own mind or in the minds of others that Murray has taken to coaching like a duck to water.

Medvedev added: “It’s a great partnership in terms of everything, even like energy, like media-wise, tennis-wise, growing tennis. It’s great. Imagine Messi would become the coach of Cristiano Ronaldo.”

You can imagine the football world’s fear if those two joined forces, and in the short term, the tour is worried that the greatest player of all-time just got greater.

When asked what he thought when he heard the news, No 2 seed Alexander Zverev replied: “What did I think? S**t!

“In a negative way for me, in a positive way for Novak I guess.

“Novak has won 24 grand slams, I feel like it doesn’t matter anymore who he takes as a coach, he’s going to win five more.”

If Djokovic starts with 25 here, you would expect Murray to become a permanent fixture.

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