“It just shows how much he loves the game, how much he loves these kind of matches.” DJOKOVIC GETS WARM WELCOME, WINS “It’s impressive what he could do after so many surgeries, after all the kilometers that he ran in his career. He arrived in Australia having lost in the first or second round in seven of his nine most recent Grand Slam appearances. “I’ve lost a few of those matches, those type of matches, in the Slams the last couple years.” “I need to give myself some credit, because the last few years have been tough,” Murray said. Murray has wondered aloud whether all of the work he put in to get back to a level of play that satisfied him was worth it. “Just a bit lucky at the end,” said Murray, who next will meet Thanasi Kokkinakis or Fabio Fognini. It ended in a bit of anticlimactic fashion: Murray’s service return clipped the net cord and trickled over for a winner. Make no mistake: He was far better in that decisive section of the match, jumping out to leads of 5-0 and 8-3. Murray said it was his first experience with that relatively new format. They concluded with the first-to-10-points, win-by-2 tiebreaker formula that all Grand Slam events adopted for the fifth sets of men’s matches and third sets of women’s. 2-seeded woman, Ons Jabeur, and the second featuring nine-time champion Djokovic’s return to the Australian Open after he was deported from the country a year ago for not being vaccinated against COVID-19 – could possibly equal the intensity and drama that Murray and Berrettini delivered. It was difficult to imagine that the night session matches scheduled to follow in Laver – the first involving the No. “It felt like that playing I don’t know what it looked like.” “Some of the tennis at the end was really good,” Murray said. local time, most definitely living up to the hype. This was the most-anticipated match of the afternoon session and lasted so long that it finished after 7 p.m. Later, a rainstorm came, creating another pause in the action. They played under a closed roof at Rod Laver Arena because of temperatures that soared up to 100 degrees and caused suspensions of play that lasted hours in matches on smaller courts that can’t be covered. Murray raced through the first two sets in less than 90 minutes before the big-hitting, big-serving Berrettini turned things around and took the match to a fifth, even coming within one point of victory at 5-4 in that set but faltering and flubbing an easy backhand.īy beating the 13th-seeded Berrettini, who was the runner-up at Wimbledon in 2021, Murray became only the fifth man in the Open era with 50 match wins at the Australian Open, joining Djokovic, Federer, Rafael Nadal and Stefan Edberg. There were moments in this match when Murray played as he did a long time ago, diving to hit a volley before slamming to the blue court – scraping his right leg – or sprinting to somehow reach seemingly unreachable shots, then looking up into the stands at Lendl and shaking a fist while yelling, “Let’s go! Come on now!” “Personally, was great to play with that atmosphere against him. I said it so many times,” said Berrettini, an Italian who is one of the players chronicled in the new “Break Point” Netflix docuseries. Murray is also a five-time runner-up at Melbourne Park, with four losses in the final to Novak Djokovic and one to Roger Federer. This sort of evening was likely what he had in mind when he pressed on – and when he spent three weeks in Boca Raton, Florida, practicing under the tutelage of coach Ivan Lendl during the offseason. That was before Murray thought he would need to retire – and even was given a career send-off at Melbourne Park in 2019, when he exited in the first round a year after his first hip operation.Īfter a second surgery inserted an artificial hip, Murray decided to try to continue playing. This was the three-time major champion’s first victory over a top-20 opponent at a Grand Slam tournament since 2017. That’s not something that I generally felt over the years at the end of tennis matches.” “I felt very proud of myself after the match. There’s certainly a lot of people (who) questioned me and my ability, whether I could still perform at the biggest events and the biggest matches,” said the 35-year-old Murray, a former No. “The last few years, I’ve certainly questioned myself at times. Murray built a huge lead, let it disappear completely, then needed to save a match point against Matteo Berrettini – who is nearly a full decade younger and ranked more than 50 places higher – before managing to pull out a 6-3, 6-3, 4-6, 6-7 (7), 7-6 (10-6) triumph across more than 4½ epic hours on Tuesday (late Monday night PT) in the Australian Open’s first round. MELBOURNE, Australia - Metal hip, bloody knee and all, Andy Murray produced his biggest victory in years.
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