Murray to miss Queen’s due to stomach injury

Andy Murray withdrew from Queen’s last night, sparking speculation that his abdominal injury could seriously hamper his Wimbledon campaign in just under a fortnight’s time.

Murray’s management team said that a scan had confirmed a strain in his stomach muscles. The damage is not thought to be major, but time is short and a strain in this area will make it extremely difficult to practise his serve.

This is the first time that Murray, 35, has missed Queen’s since 2007, the year he tore a wrist tendon and was sidelined for three months.

The expectation is that he might try to play an exhibition match or two at the Hurlingham Club next week, just to get back in a competitive frame of mind. But his training will clearly be curtailed – an especially frustrating development given that Ivan Lendl, his coach and mentor, is due to fly to London imminently.

Murray sustained the injury while battling Italy’s Matteo Berrettini in the final of the Stuttgart Open on Sunday. He did not abandon the match, but twice received medical treatment and was reduced to rolling his serve in at half pace for the last few games.

As the only man to win Queen’s five times, Murray will clearly be a significant loss to the tournament, even if there are six other British players in the draw.

“The tournament means a lot to me,” he said in a statement. “It’s disappointing not to compete, especially after playing some good matches on the grass already.”

The timing will be hard to swallow, given Murray had been playing with the freedom of old in recent tournaments.

His run to the final of Stuttgart had carried him back into the world’s top 50 for the first time in four years. But now he will go into Wimbledon with fitness issues again, as he has done every summer since he won his second title there in 2016.

Abdominal injuries are not to be taken lightly, as Berrettini, who is due to face Britain’s Dan Evans at Queen’s today, emphasised.

“In 2021, in Australia, I got a tear in my obliques,” he said. “They told me that I had to rest.

“There’s always going to be scar tissue, so it is kind of stiff all the time and I have to work with my physio to make it looser a little bit. And sometimes when I get tired, when I serve a lot, when I stress my body a lot, that area gets inflamed a little bit, gets some liquid [in there] again and I have to rest and get some treatment.”