Murray’s emotional return
“It’s not rare to see Andy Murray crying on a tennis court,” said Stuart Fraser in The Times. But his tears on Friday morning were something else. After beating Marius Copil in the third round of Washington’s Citi Open – a match that ended at 3.01am – the Scot broke into two minutes of “uncontrollable sobbing”. He had just played for three hours; over the course of four days, he had spent more than eight hours on the court. Ultimately, it was too much: Murray was so exhausted that he pulled out of the tournament, as well as this week’s Rogers Cup. But following an 11-month absence from the tour, when he “wondered if his troublesome right hip would allow him to return”, he is now “competing and winning matches again”.
Murray played “heroically” even to make it that far, said Charlie Eccleshare in The Sunday Telegraph. Like “an old rocker returning to belt out the hits”, he proved that he can still “put on a heck of a show”. And it was a “huge improvement” on the grass court season, where he displayed a worrying limp; now, he can “dart around the court” with relatively little difficulty. The main concern, though, is Murray’s “diminished power”: his weakened hip has “reduced his explosivity”. He will now turn his attention to the US Open, which begins at the end of the month. But for all the progress Murray has made, that will likely “come too soon for him to mount a serious challenge, if indeed he is able to play at all”.