Murray knocked out by world No 54
Coric trounces Scot in straight sets in Madrid Alarm bells ringing in run-up to French Open
A curiously limp performance from Andy Murray ended yesterday in a 6-3, 6-3 defeat at the hands of Borna Coric, 20, and raised further questions about how heavily the No 1 ranking is weighing on the Scot’s shoulders.
With the French Open only 16 days away, this was a moralesapping result. Yet Murray has a long-established habit of peaking at the big events, as long as he has not exhausted himself beforehand. As a result, we can be confident that he will not call for the sort of “shock therapy” that Novak Djokovic recently announced with a cull of his backroom staff.
Head coach Ivan Lendl is due to arrive in Paris in 10 days, ready for a week of preparation for Roland Garros. And Jamie Delgado – who organises practices from day to day – remains a pivotal figure, no matter how many sarcastic grins and acerbic remarks Murray directed at him yesterday.
At the moment, Murray is simply not playing like tennis’s leading man. There was an alarming lack of self-assertion in his racket-work yesterday, as he bunted the ball back to Coric – the world No 54, who reached the main draw of the Mathat drid Open only because Richard Gasquet withdrew at the last minute – and waited for the younger man to dictate the patterns of play.
According to the statistics, Murray ran almost a third of a kilometre more than his opponent – a sure sign of spending too much time in desperate defence. His forehand – another reliable barometer of his confidence level – was looping high over the net, rather than speeding through the court.
“When I started to go behind, I didn’t find any way to improve my game or to make it more difficult for him,” said Murray.
“That was disappointing because you’re not always going to play your best tennis but you can still find ways to make it difficult for your opponent. Things can change fast but you need to find exactly what it is is going wrong and how you’re going to fix that and commit to it. And if I do that, I’m sure I can turn it round.”
As his 30th birthday approaches on Monday, the panic button is yet to be invoked, but Murray will be well aware that he dropped 510 points in Madrid and will be defending 1,000 more as the champion in Rome next week.
The other leading players in Madrid forged on yesterday. Djokovic disposed of Feliciano López in straight sets, but for sheer dominance it was hard to look past Rafael Nadal, who monstered Nick Kyrgios with his power and claycourt expertise. Having already collected titles in Monte Carlo and Barcelona, Nadal is still unbeaten on the red stuff in 2017 and looks thoroughly unbeatable in Madrid.