As Andy Murray warmed up for Tuesday's match in Antwerp, he had one eye on his phone. His tennis is finally buzzing again, after a series of morale-boosting performances in China. Yet his wife Kim is in the late stages of her third pregnancy, and Murray will drop everything to be at the birth. He owes her too much to miss it.

As Murray admitted this week, Kim has played a central role in his recent resurgence. Sidelined for the best part of two years by an arthritic hip, it would have been easy to admit defeat. But she kept bucking him up, and he kept experimenting with different options, from an arthroscopy in January 2017 to new-agey rehab techniques in Philadelphia six months later. Without her support and boundless positivity, he might already have retired.

“There’s a number of times in the last two years that I had stopped,” Murray explained on Monday, as we sat in a deserted corner of Antwerp’s Lotto Arena. “I was like ‘I don’t want to do this any more.’ But Kim, she was always trying to keep me going, and trying to help get me back on the court, stay motivated, and always happy for me to go and train and go away and stuff.”