Jamie Murray has always marched to the beat of his own drum, sparing the odd glance to the front of the parade, where his younger brother Andy has invariably been swamped in applause. Now they could be about to make history together, the first brothers to be No1 in the world in singles and doubles.
Murray moved a step closer last night when he and his Brazilian partner, Bruno Soares, won their third match in a row at the ATP World Tour finals, defeating the Croatian Ivan Dodig and Soares’s compatriot, Marcelo Melo, 6-3, 3-6, 10-6 to seal a place in the semi-finals.
They have real prospects of winning the tournament. Today, Murray’s former partner John Peers could even help him and Soares get there, as they play Pierre-Hugues -Herbert and Nicolas Mahut.
As the elder Murray said after their final round-robin doubles match: “It’s not something I really thought about at the start of the season. I entered the year with a new partner. Of course I was hoping it was going to go well. I really thought that it would. We got off to a great start. We were just focusing on our games, our tournaments. To be honest, it was probably harder for Andy than us, because [Novak] Djokovic is, like, winning everything. To get past him was going to take a monumental effort. The doubles was a lot more open.
“The French guys [-Herbert and Mahut] dominated for a while, especially the first half of the season. But we won the right tournaments that kept us in the hunt for it.”
