PULL RANK, ANDY!
Murray can restore belief with win over world No 10 Tsonga
During Andy Murray’s victorious run at the US Open two years ago Jo-Wilfried Tsonga issued a cri de coeur that got somewhat overlooked at the time.
The gifted Frenchman had been knocked out of the second round and was reflecting on the frustration of playing in the era of the then dominant trio of rafael nadal, roger Federer and novak Djokovic.
Striking an unusual tone of despair for such a genial and easygoing man, he said: ‘i work hard every week, i give a lot of myself every day but i never get rewards. That’s why sometimes it’s tough. i’m not a machine.’
Barely a week later Murray had won his first grand Slam title, and Tsonga’s words became a measure of his achievement.
The mercurial man from Le Mans has carried on since as one of those players — Czech Tomas Berdych is another — who at a different time in history would have been good enough to claim one of the sport’s biggest prizes.
Sometimes this has sapped his motivation, but he arrives for his fourth-round appointment with Murray with his enthusiasm fully rekindled d and ready for the fight. ght.
They are trying to reach ach the quarter-finals, finals, a stage made ade last night by y Caroline Wozniacki, niacki, who outslugged slugged Maria Sharapova harapova 6-4, 2-6, 6-2 to score a hugely popular win and become one of only four top 10 players left in the women’s event.
Sharapova was given a code violation for time-wasting and her slow play continually aggravated the Dane, whose career revival continues after her split from rory Mcilroy.
Tsonga has had a mediocre year for less personal reasons, but was inspired by victory earlier this month in the Canadian Open. in Toronto he defeated not just Murray but Djokovic, Djokovic Federer and grigor Dimitrov all in the same week, which is pretty much a full house, however much some of his opponent opponents may have been suffering from post-Wimbledon rust.
Murray led by a break in the deciding set of t their quarter-final and squandered the lead, which has been one of the clearest indicators that he is currently still short of th the self-belief that only winni winning big matches will br bring. Th That was far more
c competitive than their meeting in Miami in late March, when Tsonga was extremely poor. He looked to be going through one of his existentialist phases, wondering what the point of it all was.
Murray has pondered the same thing at times, having achieved so much between the Olympics and Wimbledon the following year.
Climbing back up the mountain after back surgery must have seemed a forbidding task but now he has an excellent chance of ridding himself of the statistic that has dogged him since winning Wimbledon, that of not having beaten a top 10 player (although he has yet to face one outside the top three).
Tsonga (below) was no 12 when defeated in Florida and, in pure ranking terms, that has been his biggest scalp this season. The Frenchman is now at no 10, although Murray dismisses the significance of that benchmark. He did acknowledge that he needs to guard against the kind of slippage seen in the third set of his win over the russian Andrey Kuznetsov on Saturday.
The Frenchman believes he can exploit a greater vulnerability in Murray, saying (in French): ‘The locker room is maybe a bit less afraid of Andy because he is losing a few more matches and not serving as strong as he used to, not maybe hitting as strong as he used to.’
Murray leads their series 9-2. it is their most important meeting since the Wimbledon semi-final of 2012.