Jamie Murray hails rise of British tennis stars ahead of 2023 season, believes more join likes of Norrie, Evans and Draper in making strides

As the Battle of Brits approaches, Jamie Murray talked about some of the young stars that played at the event and have come household names after that.

British tennis is on the rise in recent years and we are seeing more and more players prove themselves on the highest of stages. It sort of started with Emma Raducanu who won the US Open albeit that was a historic event in the sense that something like that most likely won't happen again. Since then we've seen other players start playing good tennis such as Jack Draper.

Cameron Norrie broke out a few years before that as did Dan Evans and Jamie Murray knows most of them having observed them go through that transformation. He talked about it in a recent interview:

“I think it could be lots of different reasons. I think it obviously helps to have players from your country at the top of the sport, which obviously Andy has forever, Jo [Konta] was doing that for a few years.I think it gives those players something to aspire to and feeling like, you know, ‘maybe I can go do that’ because they can see one of their own countrymen and women doing that, I think that’s really important to have that."

He added:

“I think once you start to get a group around a similar level, they obviously start to push each other more, and I think the fact that in a way the pandemic kind of brought everyone under one roof at Roehampton. All of a sudden I guess, like Andy’s doing a lot of training with some of the younger boys, like Jack [Draper] he spent a lot of time with, doing a lot of training with Norrie and Evans."

And finished:

“I know I can imagine it’s the same with the girls as well, they’ve got a good group now from sort of 150 to 80 [in the rankings], there’s a bunch of them, and I’m sure they will all be competitive and want to do better than the others. That will push them to have good results, and who knows, maybe next year at some point it could be five or six of them all inside of [the top] 100, which is amazing.”