What a difference a day makes

Last night I wrote an utterly miserabilist blog which I kind of now half regret. For today was no day for miserabilists.

At the Millennium there was a competition for the greatest ever moment in Scottish sporting history. And the winner, by a country mile, was Lisbon in 1967.

But, let's be honest, that was because there was no serious competitor.

After today there is.

And there was one particularly Scottish bit of today. When Andy lead, third set, 5-4 and 40-Love,  holding three Championship Points, only for Djokovic to get it back to Advantage in his favour, every single person in the Nation thought, just for one horrible moment, that this could be the worst Scottish sporting disaster ever. One that would make the Peru game fade into almost insignificance.

Only that didn't happen. This wasn't Liz McColgan getting run down in the last lap, or Gavin Hastings crying over losing to a last minute Penalty that should never have been. Or even Gary McAllister missing that penalty which, even to this day, I maintain should have been taken by Ally McCoist. This was different. This was Andy Murray.

I still can't quite get over the fact that in Tennis, by no means some obscure minority sport, the best player in the world, the world, was born just up the road. It's as astonishing as if my next door neighbour George was to knock my door to announce he'd won the Nobel Prize for Physics (and, by the way, I'd left my boot open).

And, equally astonishingly, it happened on the best Summer's day in living memory, albeit one on which we all spent a fair bit of it inside.

Afterwards, on twitter, there was a row about a flag. I have one criticism only about Eck and the flag. He didn't produce it soon enough. Surely it is part of the job of the First Minister of Scotland to support Scottish sporting competitors? If Andy had been Welsh, I bet you Carwyn Jones would have been there in a red jersey and carrying a giant leek, albeit still a bit hungover from the day before.

We Scots don't really take to the stuff-shirtedness of the All England Club. That's why we never warmed to Tim, not because he was English but because he was posh. If he'd been a Geordie or a Brummie things would have been different but we kind of also thought that if he'd had such origin it would have been unlikely he'd have been there in the first place.

So good luck to Eck and his flag. But he shouldn't have snuck it in. He should have draped it over his shoulders at the entrance gate and he should have waved it from start to finish. Because it is not the flag of a political party. It is the flag of Scotland.

And today has been a great day for Scotland.