Midway through lunch with Novak Djokovic he still hasn’t touched his food. It concerns me. I tell the world’s best tennis player that I will talk to him about my own game to give him some time to eat. It’s generally pretty wretched, I say, but it gets particularly ugly when I am 30-40 down and I have just missed my first serve, at which point I feel I am looking down into an existential black hole, sense my self-esteem ebb away, and invariably send the ball careering outside the lines. So what does it feel like for him in the “clutch” moments, which have rather more at stake?

“The first thing is to make sure you are in the moment,” he answers calmly. “That is much easier to say than to do. You have to exclude all distractions and focus only on what you are about to do. In order to get to that state of concentration, you need to have a lot of experience, and a lot of mental strength. You are not born with that. It is something you have to build by yourself.”

His conversation is fluent, intense and measured, not unlike his ground strokes. “I believe that half of any victory in a tennis match is in place before you step on to the court. If you don’t have that self-belief, then fear takes over. And then it will get too much for you to handle. It’s a fine line. The energy of those moments is so high: how are you going to use it? Are you going to let it consume you, or are you going to accept its presence and say, ‘OK, let’s work together.’?”