“You not only have to be a great mate, you have to be able to understand their problems,” Barclay said. More hours are put in on the court or in the gym at the end of the day.As the week goes on, the regime intensifies There are no weekends “We have a saying here,” Barclay said. “Fridays is quarter-finals, Saturdays is semi-finals, Sunday is finals.” School holidays are almost entirely taken up with playing in tournaments and the world-wide travelling that involves.Guiding teenage boys through all this is not easy. Then, when a free period crops up, they are bussed back again for further coaching. An average day begins with an hour’s tennis lesson before they are bussed to Great Marlow School, a mile up the road. But I’ve had tremendous support and the boys have worked incredibly hard.”Although Bisham provides a magical environment in which to grow up – a wealth of sports facilities in a setting by the Thames of 12th-century monastic calm – life for the boys is pretty tough. Cash brought him his greatest glory, but when the rollicking Aussie ran into long-term injury problems in 1989, Barclay’s career was stalled as well.Like Cash, Barclay was based in London, and it did not take the LTA long to realise that here was a man worth approaching.

First Warren Jacques, a fellow-Aussie, got him to help coach the Great Britain Davis Cup team of which he was then captain; then Bill Knight, who at the time was head of men’s coaching at the LTA and later became a Davis Cup captain himself, asked Barclay if he would like to get involved in the Rover Junior Tennis Initiative.Set up in 1990 with the aim of unearthing future British champions, the scheme offers specialist coaching for 150 talented juniors at centres across the country, with a handful of the very best offered places at Bisham, the boys coming under the wing of Barclay, the girls under that of Olga Morozova, the former Soviet Union player.”I saw Bill at the Wimbledon dinner last Sunday,” Barclay said, “and we both looked at each other as if to say, ‘If it hadn’t been for that then none of this would have happened.’ It was an unbelievable challenge. “Even if it killed me, I could never be associated with mediocrity,” he said.Born and brought up in Melbourne, Barclay was never a big-time player, but over the years grew to command huge respect as a coach. Silver-haired and softly spoken, he has about him an air of warmth and wisdom but no mystique. All he wants – both from his boys and for them – is the best. Only the rugby union team won, with one of those great sporting moments – the Rob Andrew drop-kick – that, as the Prime Minister pointed out, seems to speak to the whole nation.

But the point is that no other country realistically shares England’s hope of success in so many of the world’s leading team sports.Which is not to say that we shouldn’t explore every avenue in aiming to improve national performance. And the appeal of a British Academy of Sport lies in the focus it would give to a lot of diverse effort.English – British – teams do seem to under-achieve. In the same tournament last month that England’s footballers were playing Brazil, they only narrowly managed to beat Japan, a country which could not begin to match its opponents in terms of tradition or depth of professionalism. England has more professional cricketers than any other Test nation, yet this seems to be as much a part of the problem as the solution to the national side’s disappointing form.In rugby, recent history has been rather different. The England team have hardened and modernised their approach, even if they are still no match for New Zealand.

But if the extent – not the style – of that revolution is what the British Academy of Sport achieves, then we shall have much to be grateful for.. IF would-be coaches at John Major’s British Academy of Sport are looking for role models, Ian Barclay is one. When he took on the job of coaching Britain’s best junior tennis players, he received an anonymous fax on which were written just two words – Mission Impossible; three and a half years on, he can justifiably claim that mission has been accomplished. Barclay is the 56-year-old Australian who coached Pat Cash to the Wimbledon title in 1987 and since the beginning of 1992 has been the Rover LTA Boys’ National Training Coach. Last weekend was a personal triumph for him: two of his five charges, Martin Lee and James Trotman, won the Wimbledon boys’ doubles title, and a third, Simon Dickson, was the star performer in Britain’s first ever victory in the Copa del Sol – a European team competition for 14-year-olds and under.
“If you’d told me when I started that by 1995 we’d be having results like that I’d have said you were crazy,” Barclay said last week as he strolled through the beautiful grounds of the National Sports Centre at Bisham Abbey, in Buckinghamshire, where Lee, Trotman, Dickson and the two other members of this elite group, David Sherwood and Daniel Kiernan, attend the Rover LTA School.Barclay is modest about his own part in this success story, but passionate in what he believes.