Murray faces confidence crisis after Queen’s shocker
EARLY EXIT The World No. 1 lost 76(4), 62 to World No.90 Jordan Thompson in first round
Andy Murray admits he will have to improve dramatically to mount a successful defence of his Wimbledon title after the world No 1 suffered an embarrassing Queen’s Club exit.
Murray crashed to one of the worst defeats of his glittering career on Tuesday as Australian world number 90 Jordan Thompson ended his reign as Queen’s champion with an astonishing 7-6 (7/4), 6-2 first round victory.
Making the 30-year-old’s humiliation even worse, Thompson, originally beaten in the qualifying rounds, was only playing as a last minute replacement for the injured Aljaz Bedene.
It was the worst possible preparation for Wimbledon, with the grass-court Grand Slam set to get under way on July 3.
“I said before the tournament there was still a lot of work to be done, and after the French Open I knew that I was still quite far from where I needed to be,” Murray said.
“One tournament doesn’t change all of what had gone on just beforehand. So that’s why I got back on the practice court quite soon after the French.
“But I was certainly feeling better in the build-up here than I was going into the French. I would have expected to have played and done a bit better.”
Murray has now failed to get past the second round in three of his last four tournaments. and has lost before the quarterfinals six times this year.
It is a remarkable crisis for a player who just eight months ago was sitting on top of the world after a golden year that including titles at Wimbledon, the Olympics and the ATP Tour Finals.
I was certainly feeling better in the buildup here than I was going into the French. I would have expected to have played and done a bit better.
Eighteen-time major champion Roger Federer picked up his first win of the grass-court season by thrashing Japan’s Yuichi Sugita in the first round at Halle on Tuesday.
The Swiss top seed, who skipped the entire clay-court schedule in order to be fully fit for Wimbledon, brushed aside lucky loser Sugita 6-3, 6-1 in just 51 minutes, to bring up his 1100th win on the ATP Tour.
“I had never played him. And playing against me, all are always very motivated,” Federer told the Halle Open website.
“That doesn’t make it easy, but I’m very satisfied. That was a very good start into the Gerry Weber Open.”
Federer, who won his first Grand Slam title since 2012 at the Australian Open in January, lost the first match of his return to German veteran Tommy Haas in Stuttgart last week.
Rohan Bopanna and Croatian partner Ivan Dodig produced a spirited performance as they bounced back from a set down to progress through to the quarterfinals of the Aegon Championships.
After comfortably winning the first set, the Indo-Croatian pair went down in the second set before they rebounded strongly to register a 6-3, 6-7, 10-7 win over theAustralian-Americanteamof Thanasi Kokkinakis and Kyle Edmund in a thrilling openinground clash at the Queen’s Club.
Bopanna and Dodig will now lock horns with the Finnish-Australian duo Henri Kontinen and John Peers.
Leander Paes and Canada’s Adil Shamasdin survived an early scare against Australian duo of John-Patrick Smith and Matt Reid to book their place in last-eight. Paes and Shamsdin rebounded strongly from their first-set defeat to post a 4-6, 6-3, 12-10 win over the Australians in their opening round of the $127,000 grass court event
They will next face Belarus’ Andrei Vasilevski and Chile’s Hans Podlipnik-Castillo.