Andy Murray, his serve clicking like a clock, hit a peak of perfection to hand the Australian teenager Thanasi Kokkinakis a mercifully quick three-set hiding in the opening match of the Davis Cup semi-final here on Friday afternoon.

After a fairly competitive first set, it turned into a rout almost on the scale of the triple-bagle thrashing the Scot gave the Luxembourg part-timer Laurent Bram when he returned to Davis Cup action in Glasgow four years ago.

Kokkinakis, No72 in the world, is some way removed from Bram in ability, achievement and ambition, but Murray made him look like a novice, winning 6- 3, 6-0, 6-3 to give Great Britain an ideal start ahead of Dan Evans’s match against Bernard Tomic.

In an hour and 47 minutes, Kokkinakis took just six points off Murray’s 54 serves, three of those double faults, as the world No 3 pinned him behind the baseline with irresistible placement. He has not played much better all season.

“I was hitting the ball very cleanly from the beginning and I put him under a lot of pressure on my serve,” Murray said. “Playing for my country is always a proud moment, and I always play well here.”

He held to love inside a minute, a pattern that would repeat pleasingly throughout the match, while the 19-year-old Australian took 10 minutes to hold through three deuce points, saving break point with a net spinning chip at the net.

In their first competitive match, these sometime training partners were well-matched in the early exchanges, although Kokkinakis was taking much longer to hold, saving two break points inside the first 20 minutes. His power off the ground is impressive, but the relaxed muscularity of his swing did not always deliver precision.

When Murray held to love with a 120-mile-an-hour ace in the fifth game, pressure mounted on the young man from Adelaide, and his loose right arm cost him his serve just past the half-hour. Murray held to love for the third time, with another ace, and Kokkinakis was staring at a 2-5 scoreline, with Tonight’s Gonna Be A Good Night providing the musical irony during the break.

His serve just about held up, but was no match for Murray’s. A 125mph ace clinched the set for him, and after 44 minutes, he had given up just two points on his serve.

Instructed beforehand that excessive noise between points could cost the team points, the crowd behaved with admirable discipline, which only made their loudness more effective, coming in staccato bursts. However, into this imposed silence wandered a member of staff, crossing Murray’s eyeline in mid-serve in the third game; had it happened at Flushing Meadows, he would hardly have noticed.

If the crowd, the PA system and a unwittingly comic chair umpire/schoolmaster were providing the party atmosphere, the players had given us the combat, although the Australian’s contribution dwindled alarmingly by the game and he was broken to love at the start of the second.

It took an hour for The Proclaimers to hit the playlist, and another nine minutes for Murray to take the second set. The third went pretty much the same way, as Murray left Kokkinakis standing time and again with angled groundstrokes, the final dagger a backhand into the deuce corner, and the overwhelmingly Scottish audience went wild.

The surroundings of the city where Murray was born – six miles from the venue at Queen Mother’s Maternity Hospital – would seem to agree with him.