Andy Murray admitted he had to 'put his ego to one side' to link up with Ivan Lendl for a third time. He will be feeling grateful he did.

Theirs is one of the most successful player-coach partnerships tennis has seen. It was under Lendl's tutelage that Murray won the 2012 US Open and ended all those years of Brit hurt at Wimbledon in 2013.

Having split in March 2014, they would reunite in June 2016 and by the end of the year the Scot was ranked No 1 in the world having claimed a second Wimbledon title, Olympic gold and victory in the ATP World Tour Finals.

Their partnership ended a second time in November 2017 with Murray plagued by hip problems.

Remarkably, over five years later and with Murray, 35, having a large chunk of metal in his hip, he is still digging deep in that trademark manner to prevail in epic five-setters.

As he beat Italian 13th seed Matteo Berrettini in an Australian Open classic on Tuesday, it very much felt like the rolling back of the years.

It perhaps isn't any coincidence that Lendl - who won eight majors and was ranked world No 1 for a remarkable 270 weeks at the peak of his career - is back in his corner and having an impact.

When they decided to work together for a third time in March last year, it did require something of a reset.

In an interview with GQ, Murray was asked whether it was a bit like texting an ex-girlfriend asking if they could try once more to make it work.

'To me, just because we had stopped working together twice before, that didn't mean that it wasn't something that could work again in the future,' Murray said.

'I think that you need to put your ego to one side in those situations and find a way of making it work better than it did the last time.

'Maybe learning from some of the issue or the problems that there were.'

It is a strange thing to hear because Murray is one of the least ego-centric sportsmen out there. Indeed, the remarkable stamina he showed to overcome Berrettini, nine years his junior, can be credited to old-fashioned virtues of brutal honesty and hard graft.

When Murray was humiliated by Gilles Simon at the Paris Masters in November, putting in one of his worst-ever displays, some commented he might be best advised to follow the Frenchman into retirement. Clearly his hip was hindering him and there was no point fighting it.

Instead, Murray confessed: 'It's nothing to do with my hip. I think the reality is I need to work harder…. I can certainly do more than what I have done and push myself harder.'

So he did. He put himself through three weeks of gruelling work on the court and in the gym in Florida, with Lendl fulfilling the role of boot camp instructor.

Murray then persuaded Lendl to come out to Australia earlier to fine-tune preparations for the first Slam of 2023.

'It's the first time in a while when I've had really six, seven weeks of work uninterrupted by anything, so I feel like I was able to make some improvements in the off-season and feel a bit more comfortable with my game,' Murray said before Tuesday's epic win.

'For me, it's great that Ivan was obviously out here early so we can do a proper build-up together.'

Unable to get his ranking high enough to get seeded in Melbourne, Murray was handed an unforgiving first round assignment against Berrettini.

But forced to eek out every last drop of effort and strength over four hours and 49 minutes, he produced one of his finest Slam performances in years and certainly since the start of his hip issues.

Lendl, 62, watching on nervously from the players box, may have to become accustomed to Murray putting him through the emotional wringer again.

Yet as Murray said of his Czech coach ahead of Wimbledon last year: 'We've had a lot of success in the past. He still believes in me.'

And clearly some of the old magic still remains.