ANDY: I’VE BEEN A PEST ON ROAD BACK TO GLORY
ANDY MuRRAY admits that he can be both a ‘pain’ and a ‘pest’ to those he works alongside.
Yet he also argues that his more annoying traits are inextricably woven into the attributes that have seen him pull off a near miraculous comeback in 2019.
In the wake of Sunday’s remarkable triumph in the European Open final he gave a fascinating insight into both his mindset and the excruciating physical regime that made his emotional success possible at the weekend.
This included him lying on the floor and demonstrating the most torturous exercises in his recovery from hip resurfacing surgery.
It was accompanied by the confession that he is finding his habit of constantly jabbering and gesticulating at his support bench almost impossible to kick.
‘I know I’m a pain to work with but at the same time when I’ve been asked to do something I do it, I don’t skip days,’ he said. ‘I haven’t come in and told the guys, “I don’t want to go to the gym today”.’
Of his constant dialogue with his support team he conceded: ‘It’s something I wish I didn’t do. That’s obviously irritating to work with and I would find that annoying as well if I was coaching. I would want to just say, ‘‘Shut up!’’
‘It’s something I have struggled to change. On the other hand I do try to do everything that they tell me. Would you rather have someone being a pest on the court but fighting for every point and working as hard as they can, or someone who is not trying hard and not doing what they’re saying?’
It takes someone special to go from being written off and hardly able to walk to winning a singles title in barely six months.
‘It sounds like nothing but at the beginning you can’t put your shoes and socks on yourself,’ he said, before bending over from a sitting position. ‘So I was literally having to sit in a chair and try to touch the ground. At the beginning I was like ‘‘F***!’’. Then you come back and then you go over a little bit and it’s like ‘‘Aarrgh!’’. Every single day you chip away and you go a millimetre further, eventually over time you get there.’
The 32-year-old then lay flat on his side on the floor, illustrating how it was initially impossible to open his legs upwards.
‘The first day I was doing it, the hip doesn’t move. My brain is telling it to move, I was trying to move my leg but these muscles were just totally switched off.’
He revealed that a major source of inspiration had been Canadian ice hockey star Ed Jovanovski.
‘I spoke to Ed, who had the operation and got back to playing in the NHL after eight months. He told me that the rehab was hard but that his hip was brilliant. The reason why he didn’t continue playing for longer was that he was 39. I knew if I did it properly I might have a chance.’
He is reluctant to put a limit on what he might achieve next year, but his ageing main rivals are unlikely to improve.
The exciting prospect is that Murray can get better from where he is now. His forehand notably lacks the punch of when he was at his peak and his second serve can be more penetrating.
Murray was yesterday named in the Great Britain team for next week’s Davis Cup finals in Madrid alongside Dan Evans, brother Jamie and Neal Skupski.
Meanwhile, British No 3 Kyle Edmund yesterday suffered his eighth defeat in a row. The 24-yearold lost 3-6, 6-3, 6-4 to big-hitting Italian Matteo Berrettini in the first round of the Austrian Open.