Wimbledon 2012: if you didn't support the Brit, you aren't British Well, at least one small shred of good must come of this: the death of the peculiar myth that Roger Federer never breaks sweat. Anyone watching that final would have noted, from time to time, Federer vigorously wiping his face with a towel. And it wasn't to remove chocolate from around his mouth. Andy Murray made Federer sweat. He made all of us at home sweat, too. How much easier defeat would have been to endure if he'd capitulated in three sets. Instead, he played very well against a superior opponent, the greatest player ever to swing a racquet, and, to make it even more painful for us, actually won the first set. Nothing has the power to hurt like hope does. As a Scotland fan, inured by a lifetime of sporting catastrophe, I naturally recalled the early moments of the Scotland-Brazil match at the 1982 World Cup, when the Scottish defender David Narey made the schoolboy error of daring to score against the opposition. Oh, David. Why did you do it? What on earth possessed you to anger them? Final score that day: 4-1 to Brazil. On my sofa this afternoon, as Murray snatched the first set 6-4, I grimly awaited a similarly crushing response. And yet it didn't come. Well, defeat did, obviously. But throughout, Murray played with doggedness, determination and at times startling skill. This was as proud a defeat as defeat can get. All the same, we knew the defeat was coming. When, at the start of the third set, play was interrupted by rain, surely it was only the commentators who were convinced that this would be to the advantage of Murray. Those of us at home were wishing the dratted roof had never been built. We didn't want a swift restart. Our best hope was a rain delay lasting, say, three or four years, so that by the time Federer came back out again he'd be past it. A little hope was raised when the commentary team mysteriously suggested that the roof might not be up to the task. "This rain is a real test for the roof!" cried one of them, sounding genuinely troubled. One wondered with interest what sort of roof would consider rain to be a "test." None the less, the roof somehow survived the shower, and within a few games the commentators were helpfully informing us that the rain delay had of course been to the advantage of Federer. Not much later, defeat arrived with the inevitability of, well, rain. On court, Murray gave a gracious interview, congratulating Federer and thanking his fans. Perhaps it's sentimental to say this made you as proud of him as his performance, but damn it, somehow it did. I hope it made his detractors proud of him. Actually, no: I hope it made them ashamed of themselves. My use of "us" and "we" in the preceding paragraphs suggests that all British viewers were supporting the British player. But if Twitter was anything to go by, this wasn't entirely the case. Some British viewers were supporting the Swiss opponent. You wonder what the reaction on social media would be if the Third World War broke out tomorrow. Probably a majority of British Twitter users would support Britain, but there would no doubt be a sizeable minority inclined to back the enemy ("God I like HATE our stiff upper lip. Why can't we like SMILE?"). Apparently one of the reasons that some British people don't support Murray is that on court and in interview he appears insufficiently cheerful. An interesting criticism. A small fact that may or may not be worth remembering: when Murray was an eight-year-old pupil at primary school in Dunblane, 16 of his schoolfriends were shot dead by Thomas Hamilton. Imagine if Twitter had been around during the Second World War. God, that Anne Frank's a moody cow.