By Giri Nathan
There are few rooting interests in sports as exotically torturous as modern Andy Murray fandom. This week we returned to familiar territory: Murray plays his way out of a hole, gets perilously close to that one confidence-building win that will return him to his former glory, even gets three match points…and then loses. Every player has tough losses. Not every player magnifies the “tough” part quite like him. This is a testament to Murray’s expressive capabilities, his dynamic range from dourness to sourness to self-flagellation. There’s plenty of subtlety to his tennis, but not a whole lot in his face. Rankings-wise, he is generally moving in the right direction; this summer he dipped inside the top 40 for the first time since his major hip operation, getting within striking distance of a seeded position at the US Open. But the hurt keeps on coming nonetheless. On Thursday in Beijing, he faced world No. 12 Alex de Minaur, who has loomed three times as Murray’s first-round obstacle at an ATP event this season. How close did Murray get? How dramatic was his downfall? Let’s reconstruct this two-hour, 53-minute heartbreak.
It was always going to be a tricky matchup. Murray and de Minaur are both counterpunchers who can rely on their movement to grind out rallies and strike the opponent’s soft spots. The difference between them, however, is roughly 12 years of mileage on the legs and one metallically resurfaced hip. And while Murray in his prime was one of the great masters of court coverage, I’m not sure he’s ever looked as fast as present-day de Minaur, who erases huge expanses of court so nimbly I want to retract every antelope-related sports simile I’ve ever written or thought. There are lots of fast tennis players out there, but there’s only one gazelle, and it is this sporadically mustachioed Aussie. When de Minaur broke in the second game of the match and won the first set 6–3 without facing a single break point, it was difficult to imagine a way for Murray to wrench the match back in his favor.
But Murray did cling on in the sloppy second set. He opened with a 4–2 lead, only for de Minaur to close the gap immediately, breaking serve with comical court coverage in a 20-stroke rally. On the receiving end of someone else’s immiserating defense, Murray banged at the hard court like a drum. (He played plenty of keen tennis in this match, but his chief technical feat might have been earning only one code violation, right at this moment, amid hours of colorful racquet abuse.) Murray then teetered while serving at 5–5, but dispelled a critical break point with his best sequence in the whole match: outlasting de Minaur a long rally, then dialing up a 105-mph first-serve slider, then casting the Aussie from corner to corner with deep groundies before blocking a midcourt volley into open space. Murray snatched away the set with a break the next game.
By the time he’d built a 5–2 lead in the third set, it seemed over. Of course, with Andy, it is never over. In that 5–2 return game, Murray lined up his first two match points. One was erased by a de Minaur first serve, and the other was spit up unforced into the net. He still had a chance to serve it out at 5–3, but that’s where his tennis subsided, and his bellowing surged. Back on serve, the players went to a tiebreak, where de Minaur led 5–2, and it was Murray’s turn to come back, mirroring the exact pattern of the set itself. The Scot won four straight points to earn a third match point, this time on his own serve. De Minaur left his return of serve shallow and low on pace, so the match (again) seemed over. Though slightly off-balance, Murray ripped what looked like a crisp forehand winner…a few inches outside the sideline. They changed ends. Then came a forehand error from Murray, who was by now artfully calibrating his racquet smashes to look more like racquet swipes, just grazing the court, avoiding a potentially match-ending point penalty. Despite his care, he lost the next point with another forehand error, shook hands, nudged away the camera operator—“Move,” followed by a firm palm to the lens—and finished the long-deferred task of destroying his racquet.
This 3–6, 7–5, 7–6(6) result was Murray’s third loss to de Minaur this season—one on clay, one on grass, one on hard—and he has an 0–5 record against him overall. Meanwhile, the speedy Aussie, who remained characteristically placid throughout the psychodrama, is having the season of his life and could break into the top 10 for the first time in his career. He accurately described this contest as a “scrap fest.” (Make sure you say that in the accent.) As for Andy, next time will be different. Right? Right. We are months if not years deep into “Charlie Brown and the football” territory. There’s no saving us.
Above: Somehow it’s OK when Andy does it. Murray in Beijing this week. (Getty)
