TENNIS: KEVIN MITCHELLhears how the new world number one's winning run was launched by the Davis Cup

ON HIS way home to Belgrade to “celebrate like a Serb” after winning Wimbledon, Novak Djokovic took time out to give Andy Murray his full backing, but revealed the pressure of expectation that British fans heap on the world number four “sometimes gets to him”.

Speaking at the scene of his resounding win over Rafael Nadal the previous day, Djokovic said: “It’s just a small percentage he needs to make the next final step. Definitely the first Wimbledon will be the toughest one to win. It’s not like any other tournament. It’s three weeks, because you come the week before and you have to prepare.

“You go through pressure and expectations, especially if you’re a top player, especially if you’re in his position as the home favourite here, somebody they expect to win for Britain. But he handles the pressure really well.

“Obviously sometimes it gets to him but he has the quality. That’s a fact. He has the quality to win a grand slam event, any grand slam, because he’s an all-round player.”

Murray went out in four sets in the semi-finals on Friday against Nadal, who took one set off Djokovic in the final on Sunday.

The new champion said his four wins this year over Nadal before Wimbledon helped him beat the Spaniard. Nadal agrees.

“I had in the back of my mind during the match yesterday those wins I had against him this year,” Djokovic said, “and I tried to manifest them. I think they helped me.”

Nadal concurred: “When we arrived at 5-4, those moments probably affected me a little bit.”

While Nadal left to reassess his game, there was no time for the winner to do much partying afterwards.

“The obligations of the Wimbledon champion are quite tough,” Djokovic said. “I had long press commitments, then I had an official dinner. It was nice but it took a lot of time, so I was too tired to celebrate last night. I’m about to do that today.

“I went to bed around one o’clock but anything after midnight for us is very late. All I know is they have a couple of groups that I like performing at a reception (in Belgrade). I won’t be alone!”

Djokovic says his extraordinary dominance over the past six months, in which he lost only once, to Roger Federer, in 49 matches, was down to a “change in my head” when he helped Serbia win the Davis Cup in December. It gave him the self-belief he had previously lacked against the two best players in the history of the game. “The first six months of 2010 were not good for me because I struggled with my health, struggled mentally as well,” he said. “There was a lot of doubt, a lot of ups and downs.

“(Nadal and Federer) always perform their best tennis in the last four of a grand slam. That’s been the case the past five or six years. I knew that if I wanted to win against them in the semi-finals and finals of grand slams I had to raise my game.

“They made me a better player and right now, with that mental switch that I have, I believe in myself on the court much more than I did before.”

Djokovic also revealed he might never have been a tennis player had his parents’ love of skiing not led them to live in the mountains near Belgrade when he was young. It was there that the former Yugoslav star Jelena Gencic spotted him when he was eight, playing on one of only three courts.

“I would probably have been a skier, a football player, regular student (otherwise),” he said. “But that’s destiny. To become a champion you have to go through some ups and downs in your life and (experience) situations which appear to be very lucky. But if I didn’t have those three tennis courts up there, God knows if I would start (playing) tennis because nobody in my family ever touched a tennis racket before me. There was no tennis tradition, whatsoever.

“My father was a semi-professional footballer and a professional skier, as were my aunt and my uncle. They were at the top of the ex-Yugoslavia skiing squad, and that is why there is such a passion for mountains – and that is why I started playing tennis, in the mountains.”

For that, tennis fans should be grateful – and even Nadal, who conceded after the surrender of his number one world ranking to Djokovic that the Serb was playing “unbelievable” tennis.