Andy Murray wants his fans to go wild 

Would the All England Club consider placing Lord Kitchener?style posters around its gates this fortnight? As Andy Murray prepares to chase his destiny once again on the lawns of Wimbledon, the message to every British fan should be "Your country needs you!" For evidence, just rewind to the two finals Murray played against Roger Federer last summer.

As they contested the silver-gilt trophy of the Championships, the roof came over, and the atmosphere inside the translucent pleasure-dome of Centre Court was fair-minded to a fault. But then, four weeks later, the prim and proper Wimbledon habitues were turfed out of their seats by an unruly horde.

Now the 'Rule Britannia' spirit of the London Olympics came through clear and very loud. John McEnroe said last week that "in a way it sort of bothered and annoyed Federer because he never experienced that, as far as I know, that people were actually against him." So what did the support of that boisterous Olympic crowd mean to Murray? And how much would he appreciate a little more partisanship during his home grand slam?

When the question came up this week, he first tried to be tactful, first saying that "they pay, they buy the tickets, they can support and do whatever they want with them". At the same time, though, he could not escape the fact that the members of a sporting event are not just observers of a drama; they are participants, too. Yes, even at staid old Wimbledon. And how they respond to the actors will affect the way the storyline unfolds.

"I just know how much help it is to play when the crowd is?..." Murray began, before clarifying himself. "I just find when they're extremely noisy and vocal, that helps me and I've enjoyed playing in those atmospheres my whole career. "Any tennis player - myself included - if you are playing in France against a French player and the whole crowd's behind them, yeah, it isn't easy. It helps the player the crowd is behind and that goes for every single sport. I've said it many times: that's why it's a lot harder for Barcelona to win against Man United at Old Trafford and why Man United find it harder to win against Barcelona at the Nou Camp.

"The Olympics were always going to be different. There were so many flags and stuff and colours in the crowd. Even when we turned up a few days before the start, it just had a different feel to it." Admittedly, Murray has never been as natural a fit for the demure surroundings of the All England Club as his friend and one-time mentor, Tim Henman.

The fact that we still hear plaintive cries of "C'mon Tim" on Centre Court do touch on that underlying truth, even if they are more likely to inspire groans these days than laughter. Where Henman always looked like a clubbable sort of chap, as smartly turned out as a boarding-school prefect, the young Murray was scruffy, surly, sweary. He hunched over when he walked and let his hair grow into a white man's afro. He looked, in short, like a man with a grievance against the world. Yet all that is changing.

Yes, Murray might still have the odd mini-tantrum on the court after a break point has gone begging. But these blips are ever rarer and more restrained. For the most part, he now cuts a commanding and authoritative figure, holding his shoulders square and his head high. Watching him dismantle a series of fine grass-court players at Queen's Club a week ago - Nicolas Mahut, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, and Marin Cilic - he looked like a man who believes his time has come.

A man ready to fulfil all that early promise. Perceptions, of course, take a while to catch up with reality. So it will be interesting to see whether Wimbledon responds more warmly to Murray after he welled up at the culmination of last year's final. His tearful speech that showery afternoon had a humanising effect on a man previously perceived as guarded and remote. Especially as his chief emotion seemed to be an unselfish one: the torment of feeling - quite without justification - that he had let down his family and friends. "It was tough," Murray said this week.

"A lot of times you are upset after matches [but] you don't have to do a speech in front of millions of people. And sometimes people have a bad day at work and you're in a bad mood when you get home, but the people at work don't necessarily know that.

"As an athlete, you would rather be able to control your emotions -that's something we spend a lot of our career trying to do. That day, I was just unable to do it. And before I went up to speak, I knew I wasn't going to be able to do it. I said to Roger, 'I'm sorry but I'm not in a good place here.' And he understands; he's been in that position before more times than me. Everything boiled over on the court. I would rather that had happened in the locker room afterwards but it didn't. "But I'd say once I actually got back on the court, that was when I started to feel better and it was the first time I'd responded well to a defeat. So it was maybe good that I'd sort of got all those emotions out and didn't kind of keep them bottled up and whatever."

On the court, tennis is, notoriously, the loneliest of the major sports. Boxers have seconds, golfers have caddies, but Murray has no-one on his side of the net apart from ball-boys and line-judges. Yet there is still a team ethic, even if that team can only operate in the spaces between matches.

It was Murray's mother and girlfriend, Judy Murray and Kim Sears, who helped him deal with the immediate emotional aftermath of the Wimbledon final. It was his coaches, Lendl and Dani Vallverdu, who helped him reset his focus towards his Olympic campaign - a campaign which wound up delivering a gold medal in the singles event and a silver, with Laura Robson, in mixed doubles.

While Murray's entourage is one of the bigger parties on the circuit, he could still use more help. If Centre Court supported him as Arthur Ashe used to support Andy Roddick or Andre Agassi, might that not be enough to tip him over the line? So, if you are lucky enough to have the golden ticket of the summer season - a seat in the stands for one of Murray's matches over the next fortnight - do the right thing. Give the man a cheer. There is no more deserving sportsman in Britain.