Oh my God – Andy Murray did it! We’ve “never known Success so huge and wholly farcical”

This chronically unathletic, overweight, late middle-aged man would like to thank Andy Murray from the bottom of his straining heart for providing him with the greatest experience of his sports-watching life. I was a bit too young to realise the significance of 1966 (and I certainly didn’t realise that would be it for the next half century, and counting) – but I’m certainly not too young to appreciate the greatest achievement by a British tennis player for almost eight decades.

Murray didn’t just beat the greatest tennis player in history this afternoon – he slaughtered him. Sure, the Swiss wasn’t at his best, and his mammoth semi-final against Del Porto had evidently taken its toll, but Murray grabbed hold of this match by the gonads at 2-2 in the first set and never let go. He won the next nine games in a row. Against Federer. On grass. ON WIMBLEDON CENTRE COURT! I bet no one has ever won nine games in a row against Federer on grass. EVER.

And Murray did it with relentless, intelligent aggression. I’ve long maintained that the surly Scot is one of the two most naturally gifted tennis players on the planet – this afternoon he destroyed the other one.

Tennis has been my favourite spectator sport for five decades, and I’ve waited all that time for a British player to achieve true glory – and now one has, and, yes, I’m feeling a bit emotional about it.

Given what happened's happened over the last two days I think it’s safe to say that Britain has never experienced such a weekend of sporting triumph. It reminds me of the phrase of Phillip Larkin's quoted in the title of this post. In “The Whitsun Weddings”, Larkin describes the fathers of brides at railways stations seeing their daughters off  on their honeymoons: “…fathers had never known/Success so huge and wholly farcical”. Well, in sport at least, Britain has never known success so huge and wholly farcical.

As for yesterday evening’s triple athletics triumph – well, in previous eras you could almost have guaranteed that Jessica Ennis’s hamstring would have snapped ten seconds into her final race, one of the foreign long-jumpers would have achieved a world record jump at the last moment to deny Greg Rutherford gold, and Mo Farrah would have been tripped up on the second lap in a collison with an Eritrean.

But none of that happened! Perhaps the Supreme Being has taken out British Nationality.

The only wrong note struck by the BBC’s coverage of these multiple marvels occurred last night when, immediately after Mo Farrah’s triumph, they switched to the quarter-final penalty shoot-out between the GB Men’s football team and South Korea. “Who knows,” said Gary Linker, “maybe this is the night we win one”. That would be a no, then, Gary. Inevitably, these overpaid stumblebums screwed it up. Sod ‘em – we have so many genuine heroes to celebrate.

My favourite moment of the greatest weekend in the history of British sport came yesterday during the post-race interview with the surprise winners of the women’s lightweight double skulls gold medal. After a series of largely incoherent ejaculations, Katherine Copeland turned to her partner Sophie Hosking and said, in a tone of wonder, “We’ve won the Olympics!?” Half question, half statement. It so charmingly and goofily captured the sheer scale of what the two had just achieved, my upper lip unstiffened – and it’s barely restiffened since.

I've been moaning about the decision to hold the Olympics in Britain for the past seven years. If this is the result, though, I'm all for holding them here in perpetuity!