Even now, you just know it will be all about the shorts. And so, as Andy Murray revealed the outfit he’ll be wearing at Wimbledon next week — Fred Perry Aertex shirt, cable-knit jumper — it was with a sense of impending bawdiness on Centre Court that one found oneself mesmerised by those shorts.

Even Murray conceded that they were “a bit short”. This may not win any descriptive prizes but could just explain why Murray — a Scot whom, to paraphrase P. G. Wodehouse wantonly, it is never difficult to distinguish from a ray of sunshine — was smiling. Profusely.

Or perhaps he is simply a man who recognises a good look when it wraps him in the warm yet breathable, morefibres of its embrace. For in this centenary of Fred Perry’s birth, Murray’s makeover — or rather make-under — is unashamedly retro.

Out go the puzzling proportions and lurid colours, so disastrous on pale and sunburnt skins. Let Rafa Nadal wear neon and kindly allow a Brit to work some classic understatement.

Times Archive, 1927: Shorts for tennis

Shorts will admittedly bring the dressing gown among the strawberries and cream. But why not?

• Shorts for lawn tennis

• A hint from India

• Letter to the editor: Shorts for lawn tennis

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• Murray evokes spirit of Fred Perry

• Murray bullish about Wimbledon prospects

And how clever of Murray to rummage through the England cricket team’s discarded jumpers for direction in the knitwear department. Cricketers abandoned one of the most distinctive items in their iconography but Murray, who apparently helped to design his kit, saw his chance for a happening woollie and leapt.

In some ways, Murray’s revamp harks back to the glory days of 1970s tennis — a time when we still lost, apart from one fluke year when Virginia Wade pulled it off, but a time when the heroes of the game were not simply household names but personalities.

In other ways it stretches back farther into the mists of 1936 and Fred Perry, a man whose name attaches to a sports clothing line that still exerts enough cool for younger generations to assume it cannot possibly be British.

Perry actually won Wimbledon. No pressure then.