Andy Murray is fearing a “tough” experience when he watches Scotland’s Euro 2020 clash with England on Friday with a group of Englishmen.
Murray is a patriotic Scot and famously attracted criticism when he said he would “support whoever England were playing against” at the 2006 World Cup, a comment he has rarely been allowed to forget.
The former world number one is currently making his comeback from his latest injury problems at the Cinch Championships at Queen’s and is likely to be in the tournament bubble.
That means he will have to watch what is his country’s biggest match in a generation with his backroom team, who will all be supporting the Three Lions.
“I will probably be in a bubble so I will watch it with my team who are all English,” Murray said on Amazon Prime.
“I hope Scotland don’t lose badly, that would be tough.”
If Steve Clarke’s side can pull off a major upset in the Group D clash at Wembley then Murray is likely to celebrate a little more wildly than he did when Scotland qualified for the tournament.
The two-time Wimbledon champion was mocked after a muted celebration on Instagram after Scotland’s penalty shootout win over Serbia, where he punched the air and quietly mouthed “get in”.
The 34-year-old tried to justify it, saying: “I got absolutely slammed for that on social media.
“I have got three kids sleeping upstairs and I know what would have happened if I had screamed and woken someone up, the wife would have been downstairs asking me what was going on.”
If Murray had chosen a different path he might have been played for Scotland as he trained with Rangers as a teenager.
But he opted to pursue a career in tennis, which turned out to be a pretty sound decision.
Murray added: “The team I played for was a feeder team for the Rangers school of excellence. At the end of a session I got asked to stay behind with my dad and asked if I wanted to come to train.
“I had to make a decision the following week, I was 14 at the time, ‘What do I do, do I go for tennis or football?’.
“The next week I went for a tennis session and my dad picked me up after 40 minutes, which is short for a tennis session, because I had to go to the football session straight afterwards and on the way in the car I said to him, ‘Dad, I want to stay and do tennis’.
“That was it, never went back to football training again.”
:: Amazon Prime Video will be bringing live coverage of the Cinch Championships to customers in the UK and Ireland from 14th June.
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