CAST your eyes down the world’s top 50 male players and for somebody like me, the list makes terrible reading. Not an Australian to be seen until 49th spot and Lleyton Hewitt. Europeans dominate as never before and you begin to ask why. I may have the answer. To me, soccer. To you, football.

In this week’s top 20 there are 15 Europeans, two Argentinians and one Chilean. All grew up kicking a football just about as soon as they could walk and long before they got to grips with a tennis racket. You may well wonder about the relevance of this. Well, I will tell you what it is: footwork.

Tennis requires so many strengths — power, strength, physical durability, mental toughness. Up there up with them is the ability to move. In tennis much is rightly made about hand-to-eye co-ordination but equally important to a player is being able to get the body to react in a split-second and get the feet to respond accordingly.

I’m not offering new scientific evidence when I claim that the potentially best tennis player in a class of schoolkids is also probably the best footballer, runner, jumper, rugby player, cricketer or swimmer. Some people are born with natural athletic ability, many are not. But coaching that ability in a way that might be beneficial to succeeding on a tennis court has a lot to do with those first infant kickarounds. As a kid, my great sporting love was Aussie Rules and, as my coach Ian Barclay used to insist, that was a reason so many of us from my country were so comfortable with the ball over our head.

We were used to leaping to catch things, running backwards while looking at something coming down from above and waiting to connect, pivoting and switching with the aerial flight of the ball.

Consequently there were no better smashers than the Aussies. I’d like to think it was always a strong point of my game but look at Pat Rafter, who grew up playing Aussie Rules. He’s one of the most accomplished overhead players I have ever seen.

Back then, soccer wasn’t on the Aussie sports curriculum; it was a Pommie game, and we used to sneer. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but how I wish I had taken a bit more interest in my youth because even kicking a ball about in the park with my teenage twin sons has made marked improvements to my footwork on the Senior Tour.

Tennis isn’t all about charging forward and committing yourself to the volley. It’s about those little half-steps that get you in position to run around on to your strongest shot, which is usually the forehand. It’s about making split-second adjustments to your position through your footing. It’s about the ability to move.

Look at the world’s top three, who all move so well. Rafael Nadal has issues with his knees but everyone I know from Spain tells me that if he hadn’t decided to commit himself to tennis, he probably would have been the property of Real Madrid or Barcelona by now. And he would have been a far more attacking player than his uncle Miguel Angel, an uncompromising defender who gloried in the nickname of the Beast of Barcelona.

In Paris last Sunday we again marvelled at the way Roger Federer glides so effortlessly around a tennis court. As a kid he used to dream about scoring goals for his hometown football club and was invited there for training. Christian Gross, the coach at the time, insisted that with a little persistence Federer could have had a career as a footballer.

Then there is Andy Murray, whose movement has got better over the past 18 months. As a 13-year-old he famously was on his way to a trial with Glasgow Rangers but asked his father Willie to take him back to the tennis courts. He has never lost his love for the sport, however, and nearly every day he can be seen playing footie-tennis on a court as a warm-up or warm-down.

Last week at the Aegon Championships at Queen’s, we had an opportunity to compare Murray’s on-court movement with that of Mardy Fish, who is about as American as anyone could possibly be. Murray won their quarter-final in straight sets. I’m sure Fish is no slouch when it comes to basketball and can pitch a mean baseball. However, I don’t think he’s ever been too much of a footballer because his footwork was inferior to the Scot’s.

For the next couple of weeks, the British sporting focus will briefly switch from football to tennis, and there is more reason to be optimistic this year than ever before in my memory. But the importance of football is never too far below the surface.