I had about seven or eight blisters that I had to have drained and then he put this liquid in to dry it. Murray said: "I mean, I slept from 6 until 9 the morning I played the match with Kokkinakis, which obviously isn't enough. When he was forced to sprint from side to side, he lurched so alarmingly that you feared one of the cogs might fall out of his metal hip. But for all Murray’s ability to soak up suffering, there were still limits to what a body in this condition could achieve. If he had been able to move his body as smoothly as he shaped his groundstrokes, Bautista Agut would have been in serious trouble.
His surges came in waves, but when he was feeling the power, he struck the ball with real venom. But that’s what Murray did, even snatching the second set against the run of play. It seems unthinkable that a man in his condition could strike 49 winners against an opponent who moves as well as Bautista Agut. After the longer rallies, he would double over in exhaustion – and then pull at the tongue of his left shoe as if to pretend that he was actually just adjusting his laces.Īnd yet, when the ball was in play, he kept finding new, untapped reserves of energy, like an oil company drilling ever deeper beneath the sea-bed. Between points, he was limping like a man who had just crossed the Outback on a camel. Yet he grimaced and grunted his way through another 3hr 29min of hand-to-hand combat, extending Bautista Agut to four sets before finally going down 6-1, 6-7, 6-3, 6-4.įor Murrayphiles, this was another heroic effort, but not an easy watch. He had only had 39 hours’ recovery time since the longest match of his career, which finished at 4.05am on Friday. After a back-breaking workload of 14hr 3min over the first three rounds of this Australian Open, Murray finally bowed out – but not before another extraordinary display of guts.ĭrawn against Roberto Bautista Agut – tennis’s Mr Consistency – Murray was clearly in agony from the first point to the last.
By Simon Briggs, Tennis Correspondent, in MelbourneĮven Andy Murray doesn’t have unlimited miracles at his disposal.
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