Leon Smith has come a long way since the days when he swept snow from outdoor courts in small, windswept Scottish tennis clubs as he eked out a living coaching young amateurs, among them 11-year-old Andy Murray. Neither of them imagined their journey would take them all the way to Ghent this weekend, where they have every hope the world No2 will lead Great Britain to their first Davis Cup title in 79 years.
As we chatted about the scale of the challenge and the expected achievement, Smith looked a little more world-weary than when he took up the captaincy in 2010, but bright-eyed nonetheless. He brings a lightness to the job that inspires quietly and firmly. There are no rifts, arguments or cliques. Smith is his own man, one with quite a story, the sort of coach who surprises everyone, including his opponents.
“Where do you want to start?” he says. “I was bang average as a player. I didn’t play on the pro tour but it is not like I didn’t play tennis. I talk all the time about the difficulty of not being a former pro player but it was my life. I lived across from a tennis club, I played for Scotland many times, I played in British national championships.
“It is not like I didn’t play, I just wasn’t that great. That is why, when I left school at 17-18 and wasn’t going to college or university, it was coaching. I obviously wasn’t going to make any money playing.” There followed years of slogging around Scotland, “outdoor coaching through beautiful windy weather, sweeping snow off the courts”.
Smith began coaching at 18, at clubs such as Giffnock, Troon, Mount Vernon and Bridge of Allan. At 26, in 2002, he became Scotland’s academy coach, taking over as the national coach within two years. More pertinently, he had coached Murray since the Dunblane prospect was 11.
“I could still hit a ball pretty well. And that is how I got an opportunity to work with Andy and others,” Smith says. “I saw the boys from a young age. They were always traipsing around. But that opportunity with Andy is how the journey started. Had that not happened, well … you need doors to open and you need to commit yourself to the job – and I did commit myself to that job. I ended travelling a lot with him, forging a good relationship. Then other players in Scotland that I worked with started to do things internationally and it went on from there.”
When Murray returned from the Sánchez-Casal academy in Barcelona at 16, Smith resumed his association and was with him when he won his first five Futures titles. By then Smith had begun his steady rise through the coaching chain with the LTA and gave Murray his first Davis Cup call-up.
In April 2010 Smith beat the favourite Greg Rusedski to replace John Lloyd, who had resigned as captain after five disappointing results, culminating in the infamous defeat to Lithuania. Not many people outside tennis had heard of the 34-year-old Glaswegian, and that is the way he liked it.
In one of his early interviews, Smith was asked how he felt about Murray deciding on a match-by-match basis if he played Davis Cup. “I have full respect [for] where he’s coming from,” Smith told the BBC. “The situation doesn’t change. It’s still Andy’s decision on a tie-by-tie basis. If he decides not to play, I respect it. I do understand where Andy is in his career. He’s got a wider vision for his tennis and that of course means trying to win a grand slam for the first time, and I fully respect that.”
Smith’s first match as captain arrived a week after Wimbledon, the do-or-blush relegation tie against Turkey. Murray did not play. Nor did the British No2 at that time, Alex Bogdanovic, who’d been in reasonable form at a lower level but who would go on to get eight consecutive wildcards into Wimbledon and lose in the first round every time.
Smith instead entrusted the singles to James Ward and Jamie Baker, the doubles to Colin Fleming and Ken Skupski, and they won 5-0 to avoid the humiliation of slipping into the game’s lowest tier. It was some result.
Smith promised to bring “passion, belief and detailed planning” to the job. His priority was to make the players believe they could win “at this level”. The level would change – upwards, thankfully – and they responded.
“Most of the things I started back at that Turkey tie have stayed,” Smith says. “They have just become a bit more well-oiled and we have got more experience along the way. This will be the 14th tie. You hopefully get a bit better at what you do and learn from each tie.”
He fleshes out the narrative, proud but not complacent. “Once we got the confidence of winning those matches against Turkey, Tunisia, Luxembourg and Hungary, it was good. [Those teams] still had some good players you had to test yourself with, especially with the ranking differential we had against them.
“[Marsel] Ilhan, the year that we played Turkey, finished 77 in the world. But you still have to make sure you beat them, even if a guy is ranked 250. [Malek] Jaziri playing for Tunisia – it was important Wardy beat him – and the guy is now a fully established top-100 player. Gilles Muller playing for Luxembourg … they’re not bad players.
“We picked up the most momentum probably around the time we beat Slovakia [3-2 in February, 2012]. Again there was a big ranking differential between our team of Wardy and Evo [Dan Evans], against [Martin] Klizan and [Lucas] Lacko, who were way higher ranked. Evo played very well that weekend.”
He adds: “Throughout all the ties we’ve been spoilt for choice with our doubles players, because of what they have done in their careers and the work that Louis [Cayer, the coach] has done with them. That’s why we’ve had so many players over the last five years, something like 12 or 13 players who have played live rubbers.
“That Slovakia tie was like, ‘Oh, OK, this is working. The players are bang into it, they are performing.’ Whatever coaching team you have and whoever is leading the team, you have to be judged on whether you are beating the players around you. If you are consistently beating higher-ranked players, something is working.”
Then came a blip, losing 4-1 to Belgium, with no Murray or Ward. It was a testing moment for Smith, his first minor setback. But they bounced back straight away in a home tie against a strong Russian team in Coventry, a Group II quarter-final that saw the captain gamble judiciously on the unpredictable Dan Evans.
Smith recalls: “Russia was the key. That will stay with us for a long time, coming from two down again with a huge ranking differential. We know the level Evo is capable of, especially on indoor hard [he took the seasoned Dmitry Tursunov to five tough sets and beat the rising Evgeny Donskoy in the final rubber to seal the 3-2 win]. That was a really big tie for us. It gave everyone a massive boost.”
But it was obvious Great Britain’s rise depended on the contribution of Murray on a regular basis. “Andy was back in the team, with a lot of good feeling towards the other team members in terms of what they were putting out. I think the fact the guys had some time to play ties when Andy was away allowed them to grow as competitors in that Davis Cup arena,” Smith says.
“Andy comes in, we beat Croatia. When you have Andy in the team, it’s just a different feel to every tie. It gives us a lot of confidence. We had a good win against USA away, a very tough loss in Naples – but part of learning is when you lose ties. You need to analyse the reasons we lost. We had a good two hours as a team on the Sunday night [after losing 3-2 to Italy last year], just me and the players chewing the fat on it and trying to learn from it. That little bit of experience in the World Group helped with what has happened this year.”
It has been a year like no other in recent times: beating the Americans 3-2 in the first round in Glasgow in March; France 3-1 in the quarter-finals on the grass of Queen’s; then Australia 3-2, back in Glasgow, in the semi-finals to set up this final against Belgium. Significantly, the Murray brothers between them have secured eight of the nine wins.
Smith concludes: “I remember writing something on the flip chart before addressing the players for the first time in Eastbourne that we were going to be ‘a well prepared team on a journey back to the World Group’. That was the slogan I wrote up on the board. I used Judy [Murray] in the first tie to sit in the stand behind the court and give me feedback as much as possible. We have used whatever has evolved since then.
“The team value was always very important, being a team that spends time together, that gets on well, that respects each other, that supports each other. I think that has grown a lot. It doesn’t always work but I think most of the time it’s worked. We see that even with our superstar in Andy and how he gets behind the team when he’s not playing. We saw that in abundance in Glasgow in March against the USA, how much pumped he was getting for his other team members out there competing hard. We’ve always stayed with that.
“I think importantly as well – and Andy has mentioned this quite a bit when he talks – there’s a group of staff that have been on that journey from the start, which is really nice. A few have come and gone for different reasons, but the mainstays are generally the same and a lot of observers will say ‘you’ve got far too big a team, the support is massive’ but it wasn’t necessarily breaking the bank with the people I brought in. This is mainstay British coaches that would do it for free, 100%. They care about team, they care about the players, they care about British tennis.”
As dedicated as he is to the cause, Smith has to turn off from tennis occasionally. “My wife and three children make sure that happens when I go home. But making sacrifices is part of the job, something you get accustomed to. I have got an eight-year-old, six-year-old and two-year-old and they are used to saying: ‘How many sleeps are you away for now, daddy?’ It is fine when you can say five. But I have to tell them: ‘25? 30?’
“For people who don’t work in our industry, people who live in my street who work for Standard Life, for instance, they think it is mental. They are cutting my grass. Everybody is helping with the chores because I am away from the street. It is part and parcel of the job and you get used to it. Hopefully it will all be worth it in a few days time.”
Source:https://www.theguardian.com
