Like you, whenever I see Judy Murray sitting ringside in a tidy T-shirt, next to Caramel Kim, the heart sinks, very slightly. There she is, I tell myself. The über-tennis-mum. The pushiest, most sharp-elbowed parent in the western world. Just seeing her makes me want to lie down in a darkened room.

She embodies so many thousands of hours of me-time lost to late-night training sessions with her sons in sports halls in Stirling, or to driving from Auchterarder to Blairgowrie in the rain while testosteronic teens hit each other in the back of the car. She is the poster woman for selfless, middle-age sacrifice, for devoting her time to her talented sons, so that they can live their dream of taking titles in the sport she loves.

Although Judy claims that there is a big difference between those who “push their kids to do things” and those who “push to make things happen for their kids”, this is a distinction we prefer to ignore. For we don’t, as a rule, like pushy parents in this country. We don’t like Joe Jackson or the Williams père. They’re nuts, of course, but they also show the rest of us up big time. They show us what could be achieved with the generally clod-like material we have in our offspring, so long as we can be bothered to put in the hours to make them do something, and mainly we can’t. It’s way too tiring.

So, when it comes to Ma Murray, we dismiss her as a fanatical try-hard. It’s so much easier to take her apart from the depths of the sofa, with a long glass of something cooling in our hands.

But when Judy Murray wins her matches (and she does — both sons are in the semi-finals, Andy playing today and Jamie is in the mixed doubles), we should cheer her on as noisily as we do Andy. We should look at the emotion blazing from her eyes and recognise that what we are seeing is the strongest force of nature there is, and it’s not just pushiness: it’s pure, undiluted mother love, and what it can do at 100 per cent proof.

In Andy Murray’s autobiography, Hitting Back, you get the backstory of how one divorcee from Dunblane reversed the fortunes of British tennis.

It’s not as straightforward as you might think. Sure, there’s Andy’s Christmas card, in which he thanks her for a whole bunch of things, “always believing in me, always supporting me . . . but most of all I want to thank you for being the best mum in the world”.

But the early years weren’t Hallmark at all. Judy hated “the whole birth thing” and found the mashed-vegetable years horrific. “I felt completely trapped. I was stuck in the house with these two little tiddlers, and it was an absolute nightmare.”

When they discovered Swingball, things looked up. Soon, she was taking the boys to “family doubles events” and what she calls “fun summer tournaments in North Berwick”. Fun for the Murrays, but for their opponents, not so much, one senses. When Andy was 8 she and he lost a match. “He tells me I was swearing under my breath at the back of the court all through the match.”

OK, she may be a little in your face, but the point is she’s not just pushing for her own sons: job done there. Now she’s pushing for the whole nation, hurrah. She is exhibiting a scary, singleminded determination not to accept the time-honoured limitations of our nation at this game. For an undistinguished 73 years now, English tennis has existed comfortably with the words “No British male has won Wimbledon since 1936”.

But now we have someone who takes tennis seriously, which is almost a crime south of the Border. Yes, yes I know, no letters please, we have a smashing new National Tennis Centre in Roehampton, southwest London, costing £39 million, with a lovely restaurant. But, according to Andy, no one’s ever there, so this basically means that we are trying to build a grand slam champion on toasties, while coaches in every other country know what maternal instinct told Judy Murray 20 years ago: that success in tennis requires natural ability, developed early; awesome dedication; years of practice with a generally insane parent, followed by a move of the whole family from Kiev to Miami. As for we Brits, while we are very good at hosting Wimbledon, we prefer to watch tennis, rather than play (we can’t be bothered, in all honesty).

So what we are also witnessing this week, as a Scot scampers across the grass of SW19, is a final farewell to the Betjemanesque languor of the anyone-for-tennis English game, where people wandered out, racket in hand, to play a couple of sets after lunch, on a court cratered like the Moon, with a net saggier than W.H. Auden’s face, and considered themselves pretty good, actually. When losing like Tim was considered the height of good sportsmanship, as long as you treated triumph and disaster just the same. For now, thanks to Team Murray, the years of G&T, of club tennis, of blazers and Panamas and, I say, a peach of a serve, are giving way to Irn-Bru and adidas.

And Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn, furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun is at last ceding her place to Judy Murray, Judy Murray, leathered and weathered by Wimbledon worry. For Judy is not content with helping her boys to live the dream. Judy wants to share the dream with everyone. So she’s taking the Murray brand away from the Lawn Tennis Association and remaking the game, north of the Border, to build more champions in a spanking-new facility in Scotland.

Phew! If you want something done — dunno, make the first British male champion since 1936 — you don’t ask a busy woman. You ask the Great White Hope of British tennis. Game, set and match to Judy Murray!

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