You could say I have a pretty broad taste when it comes to coaches. There was the grand slam-winning American talkaholic, the Essex-born TV commentator whose career-high ranking was 80, the veteran clay-court guru who once coached Ilie Nastase, the young Glaswegian with an earring who now works for the LTA, and my mum. Currently, it is the former British Davis Cup player, Miles Maclagan, who was born in Zambia and raised in Zimbabwe, plus a bit of help from the former world number two and French Open runner-up, Alex Corretja from Spain.
Every change had its reasons. I like to think they were good reasons, but often I would look at the headlines and discover I was being called a 'Tennis Brat' for moving on to someone else. However, if there is one thing that makes me happy about my career so far, it is that I have remained friends, close friends, with most of the people who have coached me. That's good, especially when I'm related to one of them.
I started playing tennis with Mum as soon as I was old enough to walk around and swing a racket. She would tell you that I was much easier to coach than my brother. I always enjoyed it because it was never stressful. She was really positive and supportive. My games with her were much more relaxed than with other coaches. It was fun. Jamie and I both enjoyed making her run and she obviously enjoyed it as well, but when we reached a certain age it became a bit boring. We hit the balls too hard and she couldn't reach them any more.
Mum and Dad loved doing sports with us. That is how we spent our time as a family. We didn't read books or watch movies. We played golf, squash or five-a-side football with Dad. We played tennis with Mum. She coached Jamie and me until we were eleven and twelve years old and then, in my case, I started to work with Leon Smith, a very young Glaswegian guy who, up to that point, didn't have much experience, but my mum thought he would be fun for me to work with.
Leon was awesome. He was young, he wanted to travel and he wanted to learn. He had loads of energy and even though he was about ten years older than me, we played a lot of football, pool and snooker together. We enjoyed the same things. It was a bit like my time later with Tim Henman. We'd enjoy any game as long as it was competitive, even just throwing balls as hard as we could at each other. It was pretty immature stuff, but so much more fun than sitting around talking.
Leon could hit the ball reasonably well, so we'd practise together. He would come and pick me up from school when I was allowed time off subjects like Religious Education, PE and Art to go training at Stirling University. We got on really well because he was an unbelievably nice person and I guess he was someone I looked up to.
He was a bit of a poser back then: tall, good-looking with bleached blond hair. On one of our trips he acquired an earring too. He went into Claire's Accessories for it, which was quite funny because it involved him standing in a queue with a huge crowd of little girls.
I would imagine he had quite an effect on me because I used to bleach my hair a little bit too, with a spray lightener. I'm sure it was horrendous for my hair: it made it go rock hard, and sometimes ginger if it went wrong. Fortunately, that wasn't Leon's only legacy. He gave me the enthusiasm to carry on with my tennis. Most kids stop playing before they're sixteen in the UK. The numbers are quite frightening. Maybe more than half give up the sport in their mid-teens.
I have always said the most important thing when you are young is not to have pressure on you to play from your parents or from your coach. I think it's important to be disciplined, but I also think it's very important for your coach to be positive and supportive, not critical and negative. That's the age when you start to get a bit self-conscious. If someone's getting down on you, you stop enjoying the sport. It hurts your feelings much more than when you're eight years old and criticism goes straight through your ears without stopping.
I enjoyed playing when Leon was around in my teens, and that is why we stayed together for such a long time. It was a new world for both of us. Obviously we didn't travel together all the time. Sometimes I'd be part of a GB team and then one of the LTA Age Group captains would travel with us, but when we were together we had a great time.
Our parting – my first as an employer – wasn't nice, but in sport you feel there comes a time when you need to move on. I'd been working with him for about six years, and it just seemed to get a little bit stale. It was tough to decide to make the break, but also I was training in Spain by then. I'd been working with different coaches in Barcelona, I'd go to tournaments all over Europe and Leon wouldn't be there. It wasn't his fault. We just didn't have the money to fund it.
It was a tough decision, but I think it was the right one. Some people might find it a little odd that someone sixteen years old would be prepared to make such a major decision but I thought it was a sign that I was growing up. I decided I needed a coach who was going to be there most of the time. It was just being practical.
You know how good the relationship was between you and your coach by what happens after you've parted. If you don't speak to them ever again, then obviously the relationship hadn't worked out. If you do stay close, then you can say the relationship was solid. Leon and I stayed in touch. We still get on and speak to each other. At my first Wimbledon in 2005 he was in my box for every match. He works much of the time in London and comes round for dinner at my new flat in Wandsworth. I'm sure we'll always be friends.
He reminds me of things like the time I played about thirty-six drop shots in one match. It's probably true. I enjoyed things like that. There were lots of times, especially playing domestically, when I'd be winning matches so easily I'd be trying to make the ball spin back from one side of the court to the other, and I'd keep trying until I did it. That might have been frustrating for my coach, but I don't think Leon minded too much.
After Leon, came the Colombian 'Pato' Alvarez. This was a case of moving to the other extreme. Where Leon had been young, inexperienced and was mainly used to the rain and indoor hard courts of Scotland, Pato was sixty-nine years old, had coached forty top-50 players including Nastase, and in Spain they called him 'El Guru' of clay-court tennis. It is a bit of a cheat to say he was my coach really, because we only worked together for six months and it was always in the company of other players, but still, we did work together and at the beginning it seemed to go very well. When we travelled to Spain at the back end of 2004, I won two Futures tournaments.
Then I started to up my level of competition and I was struggling. We were travelling with the two other players from the Sanchez-Casal Academy and there was a bit of an age gap there too. I was seventeen, they were 22 and 24. It wasn't much, but it was significant. I wanted to feel more independent. I wanted to have my own coach with me. At the start of 2005, we were playing Challenger events on clay in South America against difficult opposition in unfamiliar conditions, and I didn't want to be left alone, but Pato would get up and leave me mid-match to check on the progress of the others. There was no direction. You'd look up to find a friendly face and there'd be no one there.
I was a junior grand slam winner, but that didn't mean anything in this situation. I was playing qualifying Challengers in Chile and not getting anywhere. In one tournament I lost in the last round of qualifying, in the next I lost in the first round. We realised the arrangement wasn't working.
By now I knew I wanted to leave Barcelona. I had been there at the Academy for nearly three years and training was becoming very repetitive. It was great for a certain amount of time, but then I started to get a little bit bored with it. I wanted to spend time back home. Pato lived in Barcelona. I knew it wouldn't work if he continued to coach me because I couldn't ask him to leave his home and his family in Spain. Plus, his preference was obviously to work with a group of players. He used to coach Emilo and Javier Sanchez and Sergio Casal all at the same time and it worked for them, but I didn't want that. I wanted an individual coach.
I've heard it said that our parting was awkward and perhaps that is how it seemed, but that might have been because Pato didn't speak English that well. The press called him and he said a few things, but it might have come across as more aggressive than he intended. I wasn't hurt by what he said. I didn't believe he'd been deliberately nasty. He seemed to say that I wouldn't make it as a player if I continued with the same flat mentality, but the reason I was like that on and off the court was the fact I was unhappy with our arrangement. It is pretty tough to work and travel with someone aged seventy when you are only seventeen.
We also had a disagreement about my style of tennis. Every single tournament I played with him was on clay. I felt that if I wanted to be one of the best players in the world it was important to play on all surfaces from clay to hard to indoor to grass. I'd played on clay for six months in a row and it seemed to me I needed to have a more complete game.
His teaching style works best on a clay court and he believed there was very much a set way of playing. It worked for me when I was younger, then I started to develop more shots and understand how I could hurt the opposition more with a flexible approach. Pato believed there was a 'correct' way to play tennis. You should begin every rally by playing to a guy's backhand, for instance – but what if he had a weak forehand? I felt I needed to do things differently.
But we were both philosophical about it. Splitting up with coaches is one of those things in tennis. In fact, the following year, when I went to play the tournament in Barcelona, Pato came along to watch me and as I had no coach at that time, he stayed on to help me – he even took me to see a Barcelona football match. (He supports Real Madrid really, but has a couple of season tickets at the Nou Camp as well. I guess he goes along to watch them lose.)
I only made the second round at the tournament but we talked on the phone a couple of times and he was saying: 'These are the things you need to do better and I think you can be world number one.' I still get on absolutely fine with him. I'm sure that whatever was said at the time must have been his English letting him down. He's a great coach; I still speak to him and still have huge respect for him.
For a period I went without a coach. So does Roger Federer from time to time. It is something that happens. Mum filled the gap at Roland Garros, where her main responsibility was making sure my kit was clean and buying me those great French baguettes and smothering them with chocolate spread, but it was obvious I was going to need someone to help me through the grass-court season and, in particular, my first senior Wimbledon. Turning to Mark Petchey, then the head of men's tennis at the LTA and now a Sky Sports commentator, proved to be an inspired idea.
He had always been supportive of me in his LTA role, even though the first time he ever saw me play was the semi-finals of a Futures event in Edinburgh when I was absolutely hammered 6–2 6–1. He told me that I'd be a top-10 player after that defeat, when anyone else might have thought I'd be lucky to get a job as a ball boy. He was always the person most supportive of me at the LTA and agreed to help me through the grass season as part of his LTA job. I didn't need to be told how to play tennis, but having someone with me all the time, to be positive and help with strategy would be very valuable.
I was enjoying playing. It was fun on the court again, after the last difficult days with Pato. Mark and I weren't getting deeply into technical things, it was just a relief to be out there playing with freedom. It was also a relief when he helped share the burden of press attention. British tennis was struggling quite badly that year – no change there, then – and everyone wanted to know if I was going to be any good. Mark decided to make a splash by saying I could be as big as Wayne Rooney, which seemed ridiculous to people at the time. But, a few years on, he still loyally stands by his prediction.
Wimbledon was little short of mad, with me reaching the third round against Nalbandian. Mark and I hardly had time to get to know one another properly, but what happened next threw us together virtually every minute of every day for ten weeks. I had asked Mark if he would consider being my individual coach. That would mean him leaving the LTA and many weeks on the road away from his young family. I knew it would be a tough decision for him and I was really happy when he agreed to do it. We headed off right after Wimbledon and hardly stopped. It was like a road movie. We went to America together and I played virtually every type of tournament you could think of – Challengers, tour events, a Masters Series, a grand slam – week after week for nearly three months, criss-crossing Canada and the States by plane and hire car until we almost forgot where we were.
We ate together, stayed together, practised together and he remains a very close friend. When we came home, he invited me to stay with his wife and two daughters in Wimbledon and it was the first time I'd been close to someone with young kids. I'm not too good with babies, I don't know what to do with them, but once they're four, five, six years old I can start to play with them, mess around, wind them up a little bit. That's what I used to do with Mark's two little girls, Nicole and Myah. I used to get them completely hyper then give them back to their parents and go to bed.
Sometimes we'd play outside on little scooters. They'd shout 'Let's race!' and I would gallantly say OK. All the time my head was saying: 'Make it close, make it close, make it close', but at the last minute I couldn't. I just couldn't let them win. I know it was terrible of me. Two little girls and I couldn't let them win.
Well, I say it's terrible but I don't believe in letting kids win. I think it's fine for them to lose as long as it's not by a massive distance. Mum and Dad used to say I'd go nuts if I lost when I was younger, but I still lost. You need to learn how to lose. If you win everything when you're a kid you get spoiled and when you're older you don't know how to deal with losing.
It was a measure of how happy I was with Mark that we were virtually living on the road and at home together all the time. In that winter of 2005 I even decided to go with him to South Africa to train because he had booked a family holiday there. It was my choice, because he had told us when he took the job as my coach that he couldn't break the commitment to his family holiday. However, it didn't quite work out as we planned.
We had thought a few of the Swedish players might come down and train in the same place, but they didn't show up that year and I was short of practice. Everything was good off the court. My Mum came over for Christmas, I was getting to know Kim Sears who became my girlfriend, the weather was great and the fitness work was fine – but there were no players there and I had a tournament in the first week of the year. To go from playing with Mark, who obviously hit the ball well but not to the same level as some of the guys I would be playing, was going to be difficult. I struggled in the first weeks of 2006 because I hadn't had enough tough match practice.
I think both of us knew it should have been better. It wasn't annoying me, but both of us knew that having no one to hit with wasn't the ideal preparation for my first full year on the tour.
I lost in the first round of the Australian Open and then Mark told me that he would not be able to come with me for the tournament in San José. It was half-term week and he was doing something with the kids. That was fine – so fine I won the tournament. Kim came with me and I spoke to Mark before all of my matches. He watched my progress on line. It was all good. Everyone was happy.
I went to Memphis where I met up with him again and did OK (lost in the quarter-finals to Robin Soderling).Mark claims he beat me at pool nine times in a row in Memphis but I have no memory of that at all. Maybe that is what shifted my mood because when we went on to Las Vegas I suddenly felt really tired, as if I didn't want to be there. I played a bad match against the Spaniard, Tommy Robredo, and lost easily in straight sets. He was ranked higher than me, so the result was hardly surprising, but I knew I had made a really weak effort. I hate that more than anything. The following week at Indian Wells it was a little better. I beat a Greek player ranked nearly a hundred places below me and then lost in the second round to Nikolay Davydenko in three sets.
For both Mark and me things were getting a little stressful. There was a lot of tension building up about little things. They were probably petty, they shouldn't have mattered, but when you spend so much time together, on and off court, you begin to lose perspective. It is like the beginning of the break-up of any relationship, you can argue about minor things to disguise the major problem.
We'd been on the road across America, I'd lived with his family in Wimbledon, we'd been on holiday in South Africa, we'd gone down to the Australian Open and now we were back in America again. I wasn't ungrateful. I'd enjoyed being around him, his awesome kids, his lovely wife – I was lucky they had asked me to stay – but now I was just starting to feel tired. I didn't really know the reason for it. I was getting angry in my matches like I never had before in our time working together.
It stopped clicking and I decided I had to do something about it. For me, that was by far the hardest decision I've ever had to make in relation to a coach. Mark had been more than a coach to me. He had been a friend and a confidant and a companion. I had become close not just to him, but his whole family. With Leon, it was just the two of us. With Pato, I had never met his family. With Mark it was a personal relationship that took in everything.
It ended pretty quickly in Monte Carlo. He had sent me a text saying: 'Can you let me know. Do you need me at your practice on Thursday?' I sent one back saying: 'No, I don't. Let's speak when I get to Monte Carlo.' I think maybe he then had a word with my agent Patricio, to clarify the situation, but no way would Patricio have told Mark the initial news on my behalf. When I'm close to someone, as I was to Mark, and to Leon, I wouldn't want them to hear something like that from anybody else. No way. I'm big enough to deal with it. If I've got a problem I'm not scared to open my mouth and tell them. When I know it is the right decision for me I'm more than happy to say so.
Obviously people will think 'Davis Cup – Argentina' and, as I have admitted, in that case perhaps I should have called John Lloyd, the team captain first. If I'm honest it crossed my mind that he might say: 'You could play if you really wanted to. You could risk the next tournament . . .' And then I might have started to feel guilty. And yet I knew I'd made the right decision, and if I had said: 'OK, fine, I'll come to Argentina,' I might have been absolutely snapping and not wanting to play when I got there. Perhaps that was one of the reasons in the back of my mind that stopped me from speaking to John, but there was no reason not to face up to Mark when he arrived in Monte Carlo. I met him in a hotel just before the tournament. I spoke about the things I felt I wanted on the court and why I felt I needed a change. It was horrible. I was really, really upset and the break-up affected me for a long time. I didn't really enjoy playing for the next month-and-a-half during which I hardly won a game. I even spoke to Mum and Patricio about not wanting to play tennis any more. I was really down.
People tell me I'm the most sensitive person in my group of friends and family. I'm a pretty caring person and I don't like it when I have to do things that might upset someone else, even if it is for the best. Far from being the ruthless coach-sacker, as I am sometimes portrayed, I don't like hurting people close to me. I think it's a horrible thing to have to do – but, then again, sometimes in professional sport you do have to.
I was affected by not being around Mark any more, never seeing his family, travelling to tournaments on my own, not having a coach. I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. I played Barcelona, Rome, Hamburg, Roland Garros and I didn't start enjoying myself again until I came home for the grass-court season and could see my friends and family.
Mark's legacy to me is an enduring one. He was great. When we met I was ranked around 350 in the world and not enjoying my tennis. With him I jumped about 300 places in the rankings in the space of eighteen months. I was on the tour that I had always dreamed of. I was in big tournaments without having to worry about wild cards. I won a tour event and people were hailing me as a future grand slam champion. He gave me the belief that I could be a success. He helped me realise the dream of being ranked in the World Top-100. He still gets quite emotional when he remembers the day I beat Soderling to break that 100 barrier. It meant so much to both of us. He is a sensitive guy as well and one of the things I like so much about him is that he would defend me down to the ground if he had to. It is a trait he shares with quite a few football managers, who always defend the players in their team. Some people would disagree with it, but for the individual being defended that kind of loyalty is fantastic. I will always remember him going ballistic in America when he discovered that the US Open wanted to give me a wild card but Wimbledon wouldn't trade a wild card back to an American player because they said it was 'tacky'. Mark was going nuts. He was really devastated.
We were new boys on the tour together. He hadn't really been on the men's tour much during his playing career and I suppose we built up this bond from the experience. I owe so much of what I did to him. We spoke about loads of things, often way beyond tennis. He was and is a really, really close friend.
I suppose some people wondered why I didn't engage another coach straight away. The thing is: it didn't feel right. The decision to find my next coach – the right person to take me from 30th in the world to the top-10 – would be a very important one. I wanted a coach who had worked with the best in the world and/or a grand slam champion. That's what I was looking for. I wasn't going to be rushed. I'd be spending a lot of time with this person. I wanted to find someone I could get on with really well.
And so, enter Brad. I was really excited when I first started working with someone who had the credentials of Brad Gilbert. Everybody knows him on the tour: the Californian who reached a career-high number four in the world, wrote a book called Winning Ugly: Mental Warfare in Tennis and then coached Andre Agassi to six grand slam titles and an Olympic gold. It could hardly be a more impressive CV.
The circumstances were a little unusual when we got together. The LTA, bankrolled by the money they receive from Wimbledon every year, offered a contract to a number of high-profile coaches, Paul Annacone, Peter Lundgren and Brad among them, to work with British players. I was told that I would be travelling with Brad about twenty-five weeks of the year – I even went through the calendar to pick out the best weeks for us to be together – and the rest of the time he would be working with other British players. That was fine. As I say, I was excited. Within a year of working with Andre Agassi, Andre had gone from 30th to number one in the world. It was a phenomenal record. I was going to be working with one of the master strategists in the game.
We began the arrangement after Wimbledon 2006 and it soon became clear that I wasn't going to be sharing him much after all. We went to Washington together and I made the final. We went to Toronto and I made the semis. We went to Cincinnati and only lost to a player Brad used to coach, Andy Roddick. I made the fourth round of the US Open. Still together, we went for a while to his house in California, and then I won both my matches in the Davis Cup tie against Ukraine. Then we went on to Asia for a couple of weeks. Just the two of us – no physios, no fitness trainers – and it was the start of an intense relationship.
He's not an intense character himself, he is very upbeat, but for some reason he is intense to be around. He is known for his ability to talk. At the beginning I was happy just to sit and listen. One of his favourite subjects was American sports. I enjoyed hearing about them, and tried to understand them better myself, to take more of an interest, so I could participate in the conversations. They were a bit one-sided because at the time I didn't know anything about sport in the USA.
People talk about our personalities grating, but off the court I would say we were getting on fine at first. Some days were better than others. He does talk a lot, but he is in a good mood all the time. He is always up for a chat about most things. Perhaps we made a mistake when I spent the off-season at his house. We even shared the same villa when I went to practise at the Nick Bollettieri Academy in Florida. Basically, we were seeing too much of each other and I felt I needed a bit of space.
I learned a lesson: you want to be close to your coach, but there also needs to be some distance so you don't get tired and fed up. I never really did find that distance with Brad. It is fair enough to spend part of the off-season with your coach so that you can work on things, but when you've just spent three months with someone and then go and spend another four weeks together when you need to be relaxing, it just isn't going to work.
We spent days together, evenings together, ate dinners together. Imagine sitting next to someone at work in an office for eight hours a day and then going home and having dinner with them every night. It's like groundhog day – the same over and over and over. I guess I just got tired of it.
It was probably my mistake for not changing the arrangement. It went on for too long. I should have known: after eighteen months with Mark Petchey, things had begun to go stale; after eighteen months with Brad, same thing. I suppose I could have told Brad I wanted to chill by myself sometimes, but I think it was very important to him that we had a close relationship. He wanted to generate the feeling that a coach is always there for you when you need them. However, it's about judging what's enough and what's too much in that sort of relationship.
Maybe I could just have said: 'Brad, please be quiet,' sometimes. It might have worked. But I liked listening to him a lot of the time. I had fun hearing about his experiences. He had loads of funny stories, but I was listening and listening, and after a while I didn't want to listen any more.
Patricio always says to me: 'You're way too nice,' but I am sensitive to the fact I don't want to upset or annoy someone by saying something like: 'I don't want to spend so much time with you.' Once the relationship started out like that, I found it difficult to pull back from the situation.
On the court, I cannot deny I was doing well. Brad is renowned as a great tactician and a thinker, and I don't think it was a coincidence that my ranking started to move upwards. He believes it is all about having no excuses, about finding ways to win even through the bad days when you are not playing well. Funnily enough, I didn't lose a three set-match for the first four months of 2007, even when it went to a tie-break as in the quarter-final against Tommy Haas (ranked 9 to my 14) in Indian Wells.
We didn't argue that much about tennis. I understood what he wanted me to do: mainly put on some muscle and speed up my serve. He employed an NBA trainer, Mark Grabow, to help with the physical improvement, and then we worked on some of the technical aspects of the serve. I understood what we were doing. I made sure I did. I was always asking him what the reason for any drill might be, maybe to the point of driving him slightly mad. I didn't just do anything because he told me to.
He wasn't too worried about rankings and targets. He thought they would take care of themselves if I played hard and well. He just wanted to keep it simple and drive home the idea that tennis is like boxing: you will be the winner if you pound the other guy harder than he is pounding you. Being a massive boxing fan, I understood that philosophy.
However, after twelve months, around Wimbledon time, I knew that things weren't right for me. I wanted to be more professional, to have a physio and fitness trainer on the road so that I could always be working on getting stronger and getting over any niggles more quickly. Maybe that wrist injury I picked up in Hamburg would still have happened even if I had gathered a team around me sooner. The risk is always there, but maybe it could have been reduced.
There were little rows behind the scenes. We didn't argue that much about tennis, it wasn't the on-court stuff that was a problem, it was just becoming obvious I wasn't enjoying myself on the tour as much as I should be. I'm lucky I spend my life touring the world, doing what I do purely because I'm good at sport. If I wasn't happy off the court, there must be something wrong.
Occasionally I shouted at Brad during matches. I had never done that to Mark. I don't think it's the right thing to do. It only happened a couple of times but, after that, even if I was shouting at myself, I think people imagined I was aiming the comment at him. I'd always shouted on court, often in the direction of friends, family and coaches in the players' box. I'd been doing that for years. I always find it easier to get my emotions out if I'm looking at someone I know. If you watch any of my old matches, you'll see that I'm shouting in the direction of my mum or Patricio or my brother or Kim. Even so, in connection with Brad, it wasn't the right thing to do. It was immature and silly.
It was heat-of-the-moment in a pressure situation, but that is no excuse. I wouldn't dream of doing something like that off the court. You let it all out and afterwards you think: 'I shouldn't have said that.' My habit attracted a bit of attention at the ATP Tour event in Doha at the start of 2007 but Brad just said when asked: 'I know he doesn't mean it.' I don't think he was too bothered about it, to be honest, and it certainly wasn't the cause of our split.
Maybe the bookies knew something was wrong before we did. After Doha they were offering odds of 2–1 that the partnership would break up by the end of 2007. And, as it happens, they were right. The relationship ended ten months later and it didn't end too well. My wrist injury had obviously been a frustrating time for us both and I think it's possible Brad misunderstood the best way to handle it with someone like me. When I went back on the tour after missing Wimbledon it still didn't feel quite right. I had two heavy defeats, one in Canada and a thumping one in Cincinnati by Baghdatis, and I was pretty downhearted at the whole situation.
Brad said he thought I was depressed. He thought I needed psychological help to get out of it. I did see a psychologist, a little later, and he confirmed I was not remotely depressed. Brad even wondered about the cause of my anger on court, whether it was related to something in my past rather than just my frustrated perfectionism as a tennis player. I know he meant all these things as a form of motivation and he had the best of intentions. They are just not the sort of things that work for me. I didn't really want to hear that I was 'one of the most negative people' he'd ever met. I didn't think I was. I didn't think I was angry either. I asked around all my friends: 'Do you think I'm an angry person off the court,' and not one of them said: 'Yes.' If anything, I'm completely chilled.
I suppose that's what people meant about our 'clash of personalities'. Brad believes in being upbeat all the time, which is a good thing, but I don't think he was really listening to me. There was always a lot of talking going on, but not much understanding. I think he thought I wasn't extrovert or carefree enough. He said that I didn't have any vices – I don't like drinking and I don't like going to clubs – so it would be good for me to go bungee jumping or skydiving or even – but I'm pretty sure he was joking – rip all my clothes off in public.
I flew back home after Cincinnati to see a sports psychologist that my Mum had found for me and it did help to clear my mind. In many ways, I had been thinking about the wrist too much and we just talked about other things. Maybe that is what Brad had meant, but there is no doubt we misunderstood each other.
I just thought I was being protective, having endured long-term injuries before. He may have believed I had issues with negative thinking that were holding up the healing process. I don't think he has much patience with injuries. He is more a believer in fighting through things. That's fine, but I'm a different type of person. Sometimes, if I'd just lost in a tournament, he'd just leave a note under my door at the hotel and fly off home. That's fine too, but it wouldn't be the way I'd handle someone like me.
It was one big mutual misunderstanding, not helped by the fact that he had clearly believed I could have played Wimbledon. I wasn't trying to duck the tournament. I was really desperate to play, but the advice from everyone except Brad was that to play would be to risk greater injury. It could have been a nightmare if I'd played and made things far worse.
People seem to think that I'm too stubborn or strong willed to listen to a coach, but I wasn't like that with Brad at all. I respected him. He said hire his fitness trainer. I did. He said see a psychologist. I did. He said come over and train in California during the off season. I did. It wasn't entirely easy staying at his house because we only had each other for company and at one point he went away and left me for a couple of days but I don't want to sound ungrateful. It was a generous offer and his wife was really lovely. She cooked for me and helped out and it can't be the easiest thing to have another person in your own home.
Brad also wanted me to stop working with Jean-Pierre, the physio I had trusted ever since my knee problems in 2005. They didn't get on. He didn't want to travel with him anymore after Jean-Pierre had come over to Australia and then the States with us. Brad thought he was a bad influence. It was probably a huge coincidence that I injured my wrist after Jean-Pierre had gone, but you can never know these things with absolute certainty.
I probably should have spoken to Brad when we parted but by then there was a huge breakdown of communication. Brad wasn't speaking to my agent. Instead he was talking to the LTA, which is fair enough because they were paying him. But I think the one-on-one relationship between player and coach is really important and that had more or less collapsed.
I had to do something about it. I spoke to one of the guys at the LTA, Bruce Phillips, the head of communications. I said: 'Look, it's not working out any more. I don't want to work with Brad. Thanks for all your support but it's done.'
That might seem abrupt but it seemed reasonable to me to talk through the LTA because they were the ones employing him. Obviously I had taken quite a lot of flak about that earlier, people said I should be paying his wages myself, but at the time we started working together I could never have afforded to pay it. It's as simple as that. There is no chance I could pay his salary, plus bonuses, plus travel, plus expenses. Obviously tennis players do make good money, but I'd only been in that position for about eighteen months. You've only got about twelve years to make a good living from your career and if you're spending that much on a coach, there wouldn't be a lot left.
I don't know what else I should have done. All I thought at the time was: 'Brad Gilbert. God, what a great opportunity for me.' I was excited and respectful and sometimes you just learn the hard way that these things aren't enough on their own. Another lesson learned.
At the end of the year I decided to do things differently. I hired Miles Maclagan as my coach, a British Davis Cup player who had been in the top-200 as a player and went on to coach Kevin Ullyett and Paul Hanley to a couple of grand slam titles. I thought we'd get on. He is closer to my age, plays well, keeps in good shape and although he was born in Zambia, he's Scottish. However, I decided not to work with him alone. I wanted a fitness trainer and physio to travel with me as well, and I wanted each of them to have a back-up. I also decided to bring in specialist coaches, like Louis Cayer to help improve my net game, and Alex Corretja, twice a French Open finalist, for the clay season.
It caused quite a fuss, people said the idea was radical, but I don't see what's radical about a team of people to support you. It was mistakenly reported that I'd have this massive entourage of people around me all the time, as though I'd need to hire a private 747 just to get them all to tournaments. Michael Stich, the former Wimbledon champion, was one of the guys who said it wouldn't work – but it is not like that at all. I am never going to have more than one coach, a fitness trainer and a physio with me. I don't want to have five coaches, six trainers and three physios. It is just that I know what it's like to be on the road all the time with one person, and it does get quite stressful. I wanted to be in a position where I had a couple of coaches, a couple of trainers and a couple of physios who all get on well with one another and are good at what they do. Then they can rotate. That way, if one gets tired or wants to go home or wants to see his family, I can just say 'fine' and ask the other one along.
When I announced what I was doing at Christmas in 2007, some people said: 'Look what happened when Rafa Benitez (now manager of Liverpool Football Club) tried rotation.' I said: 'Yeah, the Spanish League, the Champions' League, the UEFA Cup and the FA Cup.' That pretty much ended the argument.
After Brad, I needed someone I felt I could sit down with and have a discussion, not someone who would tell me what to do. I wanted to be able to put my opinion across, let them put theirs, and then we would come to a decision between us. I felt I was starting to understand this game of tennis and I didn't need to have everything spelled out for me any more. A few people might say I'm a difficult person to deal with, but I am open to ideas. I will listen. I am definitely not interested in yesmen. If people are thinking that I am, then they don't know me. I don't want to have coaches around me saying 'Yes, Andy, you're right.' I want to get better. I want to become one of the best players in the world and I'm not stupid enough to think I'm going to get there by listening to people telling me I'm wonderful.
I think this is the best way to improve. Get fitter, get stronger and find ways of doing even small things better. I'm a very good tennis player. I've been ranked in the top-10, but there are lots of little things to improve that are going to make all the difference between being ranked 11th and being in the top-five – or third – or at number one in the world.