Back of the net: Lloyd advances along with Murray

IT TAKES a while to learn to trust a man who is nicknamed Flossie, but we may be getting there with John Lloyd. The former Great Britain No1 has steadily come into his own over this past fortnight, emerging as the strongest element of the BBC's Australian Open coverage.

Lloyd has now been a tennis commentator for as long as he played, and at times, rightly or wrongly, there was the suspicion that he was just another member of a growing cast list of ex-players to benefit from the BBC's charity. However, his worth has become clearer by the day with Andy Murray's advance to the final.

The obvious reason for employing former players, in tennis or in any other sport, is that they have been there and done that. If at first they are not at their most articulate in front of a microphone, it has been deemed easier to train them to the required level than to teach even the most perspicacious journalist what it is like to be a top professional sportsman.

Yet this argument falls down when, as has unfortunately been the case in British tennis, very few of our players have actually got to that level themselves. (Sue Barker, of course, won the French Open in 1976, but the women's game then was almost a different sport compared to today).

It was OK when you wanted to know what it felt like to lose in the first round of a Grand Slam: any number of BBC talking heads could help you out there. With the rise of Andy Murray, though, we need some insight into what it takes to reach the latter stages.

This is why the Australian Open have former world No1 Jim Courier interviewing the players on court straight after their matches. The cheery American knows what it's like to be in these situations, and, while not always spot on in his analysis, elicits for the live audience an idea of what the competitors have just gone through.

Lloyd performs the same function for the viewers at home. He too knows what it is like to contest a Grand Slam final, having lost to Vitas Gerulaitis in the 1977 Australian Open, and he also knows more about Murray the tennis player than almost anyone outside the Scot's immediate entourage. As Great Britain's team captain in the Davis Cup since 2006, he has worked with Murray in the good times and the bad.

Yesterday, as his co-commentator Sam Smith gasped in admiration of Roger Federer's destruction of Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Lloyd put in the odd gentle word on Murray's behalf. "Just about every match now you get two or three Federer moments," Smith enthused as the world No1 won a point with an apparently effortless overhead crosscourt backhand.

"You're starting to get them with Murray as well," Lloyd replied. "Yesterday there were two shots from Andy that Federer would have been very proud of."

Lloyd could then only agree with Smith about the awesome standard Federer was displaying against his hapless French opponent. "Let's hope Andy Murray doesn't watch this," she said as Federer cruised his way to a straight-sets win.

"No, no," Lloyd chimed in. "I wouldn't."

Having said that, he went on to argue that Murray would not have given up the ghost nearly so readily as Tsonga had done.

"Murray would be doing something different. Tsonga has accepted his fate. There could be a lot of scar tissue for Tsonga here. It's not easy to recover psychologically after a match like this."

And lest anyone thought Lloyd was being wise after the event, it should be added that before the match he had suggested that Tsonga was not ready for a contest of this magnitude. "He's had a lot of injuries and is a very young 24. He's still very raw. He doesn't have the consistency over five sets. This is a marathon, not a sprint."

Granted, Lloyd utters the latter cliche during most matches, and the speed with which Federer claimed his place in the final meant that this second semi was about as close to a sprint as you can get. But he was talking about what Tsonga's coach had told him, that the Frenchman had "got to go for it", so his prediction that Federer would not be blitzed into submission turned out to be completely correct.

Smith had her moments too, notably at the end when she announced that the final between Murray and Federer will be on BBC2 from 8am tomorrow. "You might as well take the batteries out of your remote control," she said. "Because you're not going to need to switch channels."