Andy Murray smiles nervously when he recalls what Roger Federer did to him at the ATP World Tour Finals in London a few months ago, the night in front of a home audience when he took just a single game off the Swiss – and that a gift. He knows about public embarrassment, the professional athlete’s unwanted companion.
That is why Murray might privately have been hoping to meet him here in the semi-finals, for a bit of good old-fashioned revenge, instead of waving him goodbye after Andreas Seppi did what hardly anyone expected and beat the great man in four sets of extraordinary tension on Friday. “In sport in general it happens all the time – and pretty much on a daily basis,” remarked Murray of Federer’s own public flogging.
It is that fear of surrendering their dignity that drives great players of games to stay clear of their tormentors for as long as they can. The only alternative to winning is retirement or making an accommodation with defeat. Federer is 33, Murray 27. They have seen enough disappointment to curdle the glory occasionally .
Murray, meanwhile, has a rather good replacement for Federer in the player who not only is constantly compared to him, Grigor Dimitrov, but who inflicted another tough defeat on him last year, in the quarter-finals at Wimbledon, when his defence of the title dissolved against a troubling backdrop.
There were rumblings among the Scot’s staff – the assistant coach, Dani Vallverdu, and conditioner, Jez Green, taking time to adjust to the arrival of Amélie Mauresmo – and the infamous “45 minutes!” scream Murray let loose during that loss to the Bulgarian. Its origins remain obscure – while Vallverdu and Green have moved on. Murray says they were not all “pulling in the same direction”. Vallverdu, now with Tomas Berdych, says they were. Who can be sure?
Murray and Dimitrov will go into the fourth round with similar ambitions but different mind-sets. Dimitrov cannot wait to play Murray on Sunday.
“It’s a different scenario this time,” Dimitrov said, looking back on his Wimbledon triumph, which he reckoned “maybe” was his best performance at that level. “He has a lot to look forward to. I think adding up the new team, it’s all fresh, it’s going to give him a bit more excitement to compete, which I’m certainly aware of. But, at the same time, I feel that I’m pretty stable around me as well. The only thing I can do is get out there and play my tennis.”
Murray? The Olympic champion, double slam winner and three-times finalist at the Australian Open is not quite so dazzled by his opponent, although he remains professionally respectful: “I’m not more excited to play him than I would be to play anyone else really,” the world No6 said after easing past João Sousa in three sets of little drama. “It’ll obviously be a difficult match. He’s a tricky player to play against, he’s obviously a talented guy, a very good shot-maker.
“You can’t stop yourself playing a bad match. It happens three or four times a year, probably, to most of the players. I don’t know, if you look back to when [Pete] Sampras and [Andre] Agassi played, they would have bad matches during the year.”
He added: “With Rafa [Nadal] and Novak [Djokovic] and Roger, the consistency they’ve shown – and everyone talks about it as being incredible – so when someone does have a bad match, everyone’s like: ‘Whoa! What happened?’ But it does happen from time to time. I don’t expect that to happen in a couple of days. I feel good just now, I feel confident, I feel pretty calm and there’s no reason why I should be concerned.”
What of the ghost of Wimbledon: has that been laid? “I came to terms with it quickly because I just played badly,” Murray said. “There was no reason for me to play that way. I played great in the first week at Wimbledon. I was feeling really good, I was playing extremely well. I happened to play a bad match and that obviously can happen at any time in an individual sport. Unfortunately for me, it happened at Wimbledon, so it was disappointing but it didn’t take me long to get over because I was playing extremely well and just had a bad day.”
The Scot disputes the theory that he lost because he had enjoyed an easy run to that point and found the sudden rise in class difficult. “No, I played some decent players,” he insisted. “Kevin Anderson is a tough player to play on the grass. No, I don’t think it was. In the slams that often can be the case but it’s not something I’ve felt has affected me before, so I don’t believe it was because of that. I think if you went back and watched the match I played a bad tennis match that day and hopefully I’ll improve on that in a couple of days.”
However, given his first three matches here have been against moderate opposition, does he wonder if a repeat of Wimbledon is less or more likely? “Again, I don’t know. I’ve played three matches here and a bunch of practice matches against the best players. When you play them for real, things change a little bit. He’s close to top 10 in the world. I don’t know if he will move in there after this week. He’s a quality player, so we will see how it goes.”
Murray concluded with a winner down the line: “I hope I am a step up in class for him as well.”
