Andy Murray is one win away from reaching his fourth Australian Open final but to get there he has to negotiate not only Tomas Berdych in their semi-final on Thursday but the Czech’s new coach, Dani Vallverdu, who, until two months ago, had been Murray’s constant companion and the rock in his back-up staff.
They parted on reasonable terms, according to the agreed party line, although there were tensions after five largely successful and happy years.
Now Vallverdu (who disputes talk of even mild rancour) will be doing his best to undermine Murray’s bid and he has good ammunition to work with in Berdych, who put Rafael Nadal out of the tournament on Tuesday shortly before Murray beat the exciting Australian teenager Nick Kyrgios.
After winning 6-3, 7-6, 6-3 in gusts that swirled and dipped around a packed Rod Laver Arena in chill-to-the-bone conditions, Murray fielded the expected questions about Vallverdu cautiously.
“I don’t know,” he said when asked what it would be like seeing his old friend in his opponent’s box on Thursday night. “When I finished working with Miles Maclagan he started working with [Marcos] Baghdatis. I played against Baghdatis a few times, at the Olympics and in Tokyo, with Miles there. I didn’t really have an issue with it.
“But, again, I don’t know, maybe I’ll find it weird on the day. It’s just something that you deal with as a player. My goal isn’t to beat Dani; my goal is to beat Berdych. So I don’t think about that in the next days.”
Nor, he said, would he dwell on what Vallverdu may be contributing to Berdych’s tennis, which has been superb in this tournament.
“Watching is one thing, seeing someone’s game, but when you get on the court with them things are actually a lot different. It seems like you might be able to attack certain areas of someone’s game, or something that they do might look really good, but what matters is when you’re on the court can you exploit those things, that weakness?
“That weakness, is it as weak as you think? It’s completely different when you’re out there on the court, in my opinion. We’ll see how the match plays out and what the tactics are. But, you know, I also know what Dani thinks of Berdych’s game because he’s told me, so it works both ways.”
Berdych, who beat a woefully underdone Nadal 6-2, 6-0, 7-6, was similarly circumspect. “We set up before the match the right tactics, then I was able to execute that on the court,” he said. “That’s what I’m really happy about. But I’m going to keep it secret. It would be pointless if I opened up everything here. But he’s changed a lot of things.”
Berdych denied that he had asked Ivan Lendl to approach Vallverdu on his behalf, after his fellow Czech had turned down his request to make a comeback to coaching after leaving Murray last March. “No, I’m just going to say it very clearly: the time that I talked to Ivan was after Shanghai when the season was still on and everybody was under agreements: me with my coaches and probably Dani with his team. We never talked about anyone else because my approach was to Ivan and not anyone else. So we didn’t talk about it at all.”
Nadal could offer no reason for his poor performance other than that he was outplayed.
