There are none of the giddy expectations that must be a burden for Andy Murray weighing on the shoulders of Anne Keothavong. The No 1 British woman player is happy to do her business without fuss, fanfare or agent, though it is worth pointing out that her year-end ranking of No 60 on the Sony Ericsson WTA Tour is the loftiest launch pad for someone from these shores since Jo Durie was at the same spot in 1991 and 1992.

Durie was aged 31 in 1991, reaching the end of a career in which she had attained a high of No 5 and reached the French and US Open semi-finals. For Keothavong, 25, the best is yet to come, she believes.

Had Murray not been strutting his stuff so compellingly and had Laura Robson not emerged as a precocious 14-year-old, Keothavong’s rise of 72 places in the past 12 months might have been accorded more printer’s ink, as would the abilities of Mel South, the British No 2, who climbed 104 places in 2008, Elena Baltacha, the No 3, who improved by 52, and Georgie Stoop, the No 5, whose ranking leapt 163 places. There is encouragement almost everywhere you care to look.

Keothavong proudly leads the pack of improving achievers. Ask her if being No 1 affords her any perks – apart from a recent makeover for a magazine photo shoot and an invitation to the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year show – and none comes to mind. “Nothing has changed,” she said. “I still do what I have to do.

“Just because I’m the British No 1 doesn’t mean I train any less. Actually I do more now because I want to consolidate – no, not consolidate, improve. It’s been a long process but I’m here now, I look ahead and feel I’m capable of achieving better things in 2009. I’m very keen to get back out there and compete.”

The journey to the other side of the world, which takes in stops in Auckland and Tasmania before the Australian Open begins on January 19, was undertaken with significantly more assurance than before. Keothavong’s previous ranking levels were such that she was entered only in the qualifying events. Last year she was beaten in the second round of the qualifiers in Melbourne, having failed to get through similar stages in the lead-up tournaments on the Gold Coast and in Sydney. Now she can enjoy the relative comfort of a place in the main draw.

“There have been hard times, times when I’ve questioned what I was doing and why I bothered, but ultimately I’ve done this for a dream, a love of the game,” she said.

“I’ve taken myself to some far-flung places, a lot of outback towns. There have been many ups and downs, but I’ve always tried to find a way to keep going. Had I not had the year I’ve just had, perhaps I’d have been considering something else to do, but although 25 is oldish in tennis years, I feel very young and very strong.”

It was during the grass-court season – one enlivened by her Centre Court bow at Wimbledon in a second-round match against Venus Williams, when she extended the player who was to retain her title – that Keothavong chose to steer a slightly different course. She had been eschewing offers of coaching help, winning the title in Jounieh, Lebanon, as riots consumed Beirut, the capital, 15 miles away, then having to find her own way home via neighbouring Syria in a car escorted by Lebanese security. Taking on the defending champion at Wimbledon does not seem such an ordeal after that kind of experience.

By Wimbledon, Keothavong – whose parents fled from Laos to Britain in the 1970s – was being coached by Claire Curran, a former doubles partner, and Nigel Sears, the Great Britain Fed Cup captain. She also called upon the experience of visits to Richard De Souza, a GP from Beckenham, Kent, who dabbles in sports psychology. “I suppose I was a bit of a guinea pig,” Keothavong said. “I was open to different things because I wanted to improve and felt something was holding me back. Richard challenged my thoughts. At times he made me feel quite stupid because I continually questioned myself and he’d tell me I was being quite ridiculous. I just have a different perspective now.

“This is a game which is played so much between the ears. My confidence levels cannot be compared to what they once were – there are no doubts now. It’s about feeling you belong and I do.”

In New York, such belief was self-evident. Trailing 4-2 in the final set of her US Open second-round match against Francesca Schiavone, the gutsy No 25 seed from Italy, Keothavong dug deep, refused to countenance defeat and broke Schiavone’s resistance bit by bit, winning the final four games for a 6-2, 3-6, 6-4 triumph. Her reward, a third-round match against Elena Dementieva, the No 5 seed from Russia, brought Keothavong seven games and a ton of plaudits in defeat. In her last tournament of 2008, a $100,000 ITF event, she took the title in Krakow.

“Now I want to win on the WTA tour proper and I don’t think it’s beyond me,” she said. In February she will lead the Fed Cup team into zonal play-offs in Estonia. One day, very soon, she hopes that Robson will have forced her way into the reckoning and that Britain will have a real opportunity of a return to the competition’s world group.

“At 14 I was really just a schoolgirl who occasionally took a few days off to play in international tournaments, but I’m glad I got in a full education,” Keothavong said. “It is a scary now when you hear of 7 or 8-year-olds who are more or less full-time players.

“You can see from the way Laura plays and what she has already achieved, which is unbelievable, she is a star of the future. We have the strongest British team for a long time and she gives us greater hope for the future. And then there are the Olympics in 2012 – they are a major goal. I’m an East End girl. I’m playing now to be there more than anything else.”