Ivan Lendl was in a chatty mood before he sat without animation through an edge-of-the-seat experience rather familiar to those who have charted Andy Murray’s career victory by victory, grimace by grimace, joy by joy, heartbreak by heartbreak, groin clutch by groin clutch.
“Andy’s having so much fun at the moment,” he said. Later, as he hurried from the hurly-burly of Roland Garros, Murray’s coach stopped only to say that “it’s always good to get through a match like that”, preferring to leave the substance of the debrief to the player he is attempting to steer to that first grand-slam tournament triumph. The more he stays around, the more he will have to get used to agonies such as this. Fun? It didn’t look it.
Murray, a semi-finalist last year, is into the third round of the French Open courtesy of a 1-6, 6-4, 6-1, 6-2 win over Jarkko Nieminen, the Finn, which contained the elements of melodrama that settle on the British No 1 whenever he steps through the portals of this grand old place. At least his followers were spared a fifth set, but there was enough to bottle in the four that were played to make this another one of those minted Murray moments.
He had woken up yesterday with a bit of a spasm and unable to put any weight on his left leg. It developed into an ache that meant the early start could conspire against him.
Let him take up the tale. “We talked about not playing but right at the beginning of the match, again, I was OK,” he said. “I don’t know if it was nerves, adrenalin, whatever.
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“Then I got up from the changeover at 3-0, it was really, really sore. I was struggling a lot for about an hour and 15, hour and a half. It still wasn’t great, but I was just kind of gritting my teeth and trying to find a way of turning the match around because I was a few points from stopping around the middle of the second set.”
There you have it. But imagine Nieminen’s mindset. Any tennis player, professional or otherwise, will tell you that playing someone you consider to be injured is the hardest thing of all. What shot do you play, how do you counter someone flailing away at the ball, sometimes from a stationary position and is making winner and desperate error in equal measure? Nieminen was not sure whether to force or block. Even at 4-4 in the second set, when he had three break points courtesy of two Murray double faults — “This is killing me inside,” he screamed — Nieminen was spurning the opportunities that were not to be his again.
By the end of the match, Murray was playing some scintillatingly expressive tennis. It almost looked like fun.
Commentating on television, Virginia Wade, Britain’s last Wimbledon champion, suggested that Murray was a drama queen, and she was not exactly Queen Ginny in his eyes. “There are people who have to come out and say something controversial when really they should be supportive, or maybe ask me a question first before commenting on it,” he said. “I’ve known her [Wade] since I was a really young kid. She used to do coaching stuff with my mum, so to me that’s quite disappointing. She has no idea what I was feeling on the court. She doesn’t know what was happening 20 minutes before I went out on to the court, what I was feeling, what I was doing. There’s nothing more I can say about that.”
Murray’s assertion that a twinge can happen at any time is right. But the player has several events on the horizon that can leave a golden glow on his career, not least Wimbledon and the Olympic Games. He needs to make sure that he is not jeopardising future hopes because of a stubborn streak that he undoubtedly possesses.
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Last year, in the third round, Murray rolled an ankle so badly against Michael Berrer, it was astonishing that the German could not summon the strength to see him off.
The Scot was only at half-pace yet recovered from two sets down against Viktor Troicki, of Serbia, in the next round and, even more astonishingly, gave Rafael Nadal a decent run for his money in the semi-finals. Everyone has been warned.
In the third round tomorrow, Santiago Giraldo, of Colombia, will make life as uncomfortable as possible for Murray and on clay that is the world No 50’s best chance.
Against that, though, Giraldo won only three games against him when they played on the dirt in Barcelona a month ago.