A PRETTY poor weekend, on the whole. You’re feeling like a piece of ****, you lose a ****ing tennis match and then your team get fined $2,500 because you said **** to the wrong person. But to make the weekend even *****ier, if that were possible, every ****ing ****er in the whole ****ing country is on your case, tut-tutting and moralising, especially people who you know say **** all the ****ing time. Or if not, they’ re being ****ing patronising and telling you that they appreciate your ****ing passion. **** the lot of them.

Andy Murray’s Braveheart return to Scotland did not go quite according to the script. The idea was to have Murray leading Great Britain to victory in a Davis Cup tie against Serbia and Montenegro in front on a crowd of mad, revved-up Scots drunk on patriotism and Murraymania and turning the Braehead Arena in Glasgow to a mixture of Ibrox on Auld Firm night and a medieval bearbaiting session.

But Murray had an ankle injury and then went down with a fever and so he couldn’t play the first day. He played in the doubles with Greg Rusedski on Saturday, face white as a sheet, and found himself, unsurprisingly, ever-so-slightly out of sorts with himself, his game, his partner and the world.

The frustration drove him nuts. His game was just a fraction out, but minute errors of timing turn into lost points and lost opportunities, and ultimately into lost matches. A bad line-call in the last set cost them a break, they broke back but then had the desperate frustration of being broken again. Murray sent a ball whanging at the ceiling and at the end had a go at the umpire. Said **** and so forth, rather too pointedly.

And so Britain duly went on to lose the tie yesterday, despite Rusedski’s heroics. For a tiny moment, it seemed that Rusedski might pull off an impossible win and that Murray would then do an arise-Lazarus and win the fifth and deciding rubber. But when weekends go wrong as badly as Murray’s weekend did, such things don’t happen. Should have stayed in ****ing bed.

Things could be worse, though. Murray may have had a ****ing awful weekend, but at least he exists. There will be other weekends, other tennis matches, other occasions when his passion is more decoratively and more effectively expressed. Britain may have lost yet another Davis Cup tie, and the nation’s strength in depth is once again uncompromisingly exposed, but Murray lives on and when not feeling like a piece of ****, he is a ****ing good tennis player.

Let’s not worry about the bad behaviour overmuch — though let’s not excuse it by talk of passion, either. A teenager said **** to the umpire: all right. Fine the silly ****** and move on. It’s not a big deal. The big deal is his talent — shown in brief, tantalising glimpses on Saturday — and the temperament that goes with it.

With Rusedski and Tim Henman in their thirties and on the down slope, it’s an unexpected pleasure to have someone on the up slope, particularly a spiky kid with a a bit of attitude. When that attitude is directed at opponents rather than umpires, and expressed by means of furry balls rather than words with Anglo-Saxon etymology, it’s a thing to wonder at. I doubt if he’ll be the man to take Britain storming to Davis Cup credibility — there needs to be at least one more of him, for a start — but he’s going to win some more tennis matches.

He is also going to have to do his growing up in public. I am glad that newspapers did not report every single foolish thing I did or said when I was a teenager (or an adult, for that matter). Still, if it meant that I was going to be wealthy and famous and adored by millions, it might — just — have been worth it. Provided they didn’t print the story of when I got ****ed and — but hush. I was only a teenager.

So is Murray, and that’s the point. We’ve got something like a decade and a half of him to enjoy, if all goes well, to wince at his indiscretions and marvel at his fire, to tut at his misdemeanours (remember that Henman’s first memorable act at Wimbledon was to flatten a ballgirl) and to revel in his zest for the struggle.

Chrissie Hynde said a marvellous thing about girl singers who prink and preen: “This is rock and roll. It’s not **** me, it’s **** you.” All sports, including tennis, are on the ****-you side of things. So let’s celebrate Murray’s God-awful weekend, because he’ll have better ones. Because he might just go on to be ****ing great.