I accepted the defeat. I felt it was part of the give-and-take of sport – if I was happy to win the tournament in 1986, then I had to be willing to accept the loss in 1987. I was still very much a major player in world tennis, even if I dropped from second to fourth in the rankings, and I felt I was challenging for the No. 1 spot on all surfaces.

So it was totally natural in one of my post-match interviews – it was live on the BBC – that I said, ‘I’ve lost a tennis match, I haven’t lost a war – nobody was killed.’ This had an extraordinary resonance, but I didn’t mean it to. As tennis players we understand better than most how close so many matches are. Literally a single point can make the difference between winning and losing – look at my matches with Nyström and Mayotte in 1985 – so we don’t kid ourselves, even if we sometimes try to tell the world that our victory was never in doubt; it’s very much in doubt most of the time. I wanted to put my defeat in perspective. I think journalists often don’t give enough credit to the loser, and the winner gets too much glory without people understanding that the match could have gone either way. The result doesn’t mean one player is better than the other; just that one beat the other on the day. I was trying to say: please don’t put me on a pedestal when I win because I could have lost, and please don’t now put me in the cellar and throw me to the lions when I lose to a very talented Australian player who happened to be better that day. I was 19, and at that age you don’t think about it, it just comes out. I didn’t want to be the hamster in the wheel, so I said what I felt because I really meant it, but it wasn’t a prepared comment or meant to be a big philosophical statement.