Painted as the slave-driver, she is instead Murray's greatest protector.

It was in her company he was photographed one drizzly morning last November, nursing the wounds of his brief break-up from Miss Sears.

It was to her, too, that he looked for comfort at Toronto's Rogers Centre, once his coaching staff had begun to come apart at the seams.

Outside the grand slams, Judy seldom travels abroad with her boy, but since long-time coach Miles Maclagan slipped from the stage her presence and her pride have all been invaluable.

Such concern is reciprocated, sometimes touchingly. Few could forget how Murray fulminated in the first round of the Rome Masters in 2008, when Juan Martín del Potro cheekily impugned his mother for her vocal support from the stands.

"I will accept lots of things," he seethed. "But not when someone insults my mum, the nicest person in the world." Aww, you could hear the girls simper.

In reality, Mrs Murray's niceness is no doubt stretched to breaking point at private moments by Andy's PlayStation habit.

But sport imitates life in terms of the massive allowances mums must make for their progeny.

Take Tilda Woods: how hurt and hollow she looked in the Sawgrass clubhouse six months ago as Tiger documented, with abject candour and in front of a television audience of millions, the ways he had disappointed her, desecrating the Buddhist values she had instilled in him.

And yet at the end of it all, she stepped up and gave him one huge hug.

Even that most incorrigible breed, the Premier League footballers, are not immune to such soppy sentiment.

It is a well-known fact on the football circuit that one of the few whispered banalities you will ever elicit from Michael Essien is that he calls his mother back home in Ghana every day.

Curiously, when it comes to fathers in sport, the picture becomes more muddy. They do not so much tame potential bad boys as garner the notoriety themselves.

Richard Williams, despite his propulsion of Venus and Serena to prominence from the backstreets of Compton, Los Angeles, gets a bad rap for the way he insists on committing all his daughters' victories to camera.

Then there was the lunacy of Damir Dokic, father to poor sap Jelena, once one of tennis's brightest prodigies.

This bearded Serbian truck driver was thrown out of an event in Birmingham in 1999 after describing members of the club as "Nazis who supported the bombing of Yugoslavia".

The nightmare of the tennis dad throws the blissful simplicity of Murray's reliance upon his mother's wisdom into sharp relief.

It reminded me of something, too. At home I have a small picture – and no prizes for guessing who gave it to me – of two elephants, a matriarch leading its calf, underneath the words, "Because I'm your mother, that's why".

For Murray, for Woods, for all those sports stars seeking sense amid the madness they inhabit, it is often explanation enough.

Cook's contribution without the bat

Alastair Cook will come under intense scrutiny at The Oval this week after Andy Flower kept faith in the Essex batsman despite his recent run of poor form. But Cook's presence in the team is more than just his runs, writes Duncan Fletcher in The Guardian

There is an interesting comparison to be made between Mohammad Yousuf and Alastair Cook, two batsmen who will be starting the third Test under intense pressure. They will be judged largely on how many runs they score, but I suspect that both have been picked partly because of other considerations. There are aspects of team selection that some pundits and members of the public do not appreciate.

Looking at the cricket Pakistan have played so far on this tour, it is obvious that their weaknesses have been mental as much as technical. This is where Yousuf's involvement will be key. Given that he has had so little match-practice it would be a minor miracle if he made many runs, but as a senior player he can still have a huge influence on the rest of the team. He will need to give a steer to the younger players on how to approach batting in overseas conditions. Just as importantly, he will need to support Salman Butt, who is an inexperienced captain in the middle of a tough tour. Any old grudges between the two must be put aside. Together they must get the message across to the players that the team have to dig deep and try to do a job for their country.

When a player is in a poor run of form, critics on the outside will always wonder why you are standing by him. The answer is often in the contribution he makes to the team behind the scenes. This is the situation England are in with Cook. The management seem to see him as a positive influence on the dressing room. When some players hit a poor patch of form they can become so self-involved that they do not realise the negative influence they are having on the rest of the team. Others will make an effort to stay positive in public but will never quite put their hearts into it. You can hear in a player's voice whether he really means what he says. It is a rare and valuable team member who can genuinely encourage and push other players along, even when he is on a poor run himself. I assume Cook is like that.

The selectors have clearly laid down their cards; he is the man who will open the batting in Australia. With only one Test to play after this, they have run out of time to try an alternative opening combination. They will be hoping that their show of faith will help him through the slump. His place for the winter looks safe. That will lift any worries he may have had about losing his place and allow him to concentrate on improving his game.

Cook is a player who will always be fighting his own technique because the biomechanics of it are so unnatural. That means coaches must be very careful how they handle him. He does not have a conventional technique and it is crucial that any alterations made accommodate that unconventionality rather than eliminate it. There is no point trying to convert his method wholesale into something that looks more like what you might find on the pages of a coaching manual. Do that and you risk throwing his whole game out of kilter. And it is important only to change one link in a batsman's technique at a time; it means you can track what is having a good effect and what is not.

Also, the coaches must identify the cause, not just the problem. Often the root of a flaw is a long way away from where the error is actually being made.

When Pakistan last toured England in 2006, Cook felt he was having trouble playing spin bowling. I noticed that his hands were too high on the handle. The bat was too whippy and that made it hard to stop when playing defensively. That explained why he seemed to play with hard hands against spin bowling. He felt more comfortable and in control after making that tweak.

England need Cook to recover. The fact that he was chosen to captain the side in Andrew Strauss's absence in Bangladesh this winter shows he has qualities as a man-manager and suggests he works well with the other senior figures in the set-up.

In all team sports the most successful sides have units of leaders who work together for the team cause. That may be why England's selectors are so keen to keep Cook in the team. That is also the area where Pakistan need Yousuf to contribute. If you have leaders who are working against each other then you end up with absolute chaos. This is what Pakistan have suffered from in the past. Both men need big innings, but neither should be judged by runs alone.