Murray in race to be fit for SW19
Abdomen pain thwarts Andy in final
ANDY MURRAY faces an anxious wait to see if he can play at Queen’s and Wimbledon after getting injured in yesterday’s Stuttgart Open final.
The Scot, 35, has been running into form but was impeded by pain in a stomach muscle in the final set of a 6-4, 5-7, 6-3 defeat against Italy’s Matteo Berrettini. By the end he was struggling to serve properly and will undergo checks to find out the extent of the damage with Wimbledon just two weeks away.
‘I got some pain in my abdomen when I was serving, not something I have ever had before,’ he said. ‘I need to get it checked when I get home. I played Thursday through Saturday last week and then Thursday through to Sunday here. So it is probably normal that I would feel some stuff in my body but I don’t really know the severity of it. ‘It has been a good week but not the way I wanted to finish. I was playing well and got myself into a really good position going into the third set.’
JUST when Andy Murray appeared to be coming to the boil ahead of Wimbledon came a reminder about the fragility of his 35-year-old frame.
Moving with a sprightliness of old, beating top-10 players and reunited with Ivan Lendl, he has been showing that few know more about playing on grass than he does.
And then came an injury scare, shortly after he had broken last year’s Wimbledon runner- up Matteo Berrettini to send the final of the Stuttgart Open into a deciding set.
Later reporting that hat he felt pain in his abdomen, , he was reduced to serving at t half pace as he went down own 6-4, 5-7, 6-3 to a player er sure to be a genuine e threat at SW19.
Murray called for the tour physio after being broken at the start of the final set and then again in the middle of the seventh game when he was trailing 4-2.
That was enough to o strike dread into all those who have been een encouraged by his recent ecent form, kindling hopes s that he might yet be able to launch another of those stirring i i runs at the All England Club.
Instead, he is likely to have a scan this morning ahead of what is supposed to be a first-round outing against Italy’s Lorenzo Sonego at Queen’s Club.
‘There’s been a lot of progress in the last few weeks and I’m looking forward to what the future has to hold,’ Murray told an appreciative German crowd.
‘I’m feeling a lot better about my game. Hopefully my body can hold up a little while longer so I can keep playing matches like this.’
In the immediate aftermath he was unsure about the severity of any issue. Murray had soldiered on to the end in what might have been a case of valour winning out over discretion.
As he observed, with his semifinal at Surbiton the previous week he has put his metal hip-infused body through a heavy workload, so it is natural there would be some stress. He said: ‘This is the most I have played in two weeks since probably 2016. It’s a really long time. I have played nine matches in 14 days.’
High up in Murray’s mind will be the desire to get a seeding at Wimbledon. After yesterday he is likely to be around No 47 in the rankings and, with the absence of banned Russians at SW19, the threshold is likely to be about 37 to avoid the best players in the early rounds.
Now he will need to make at least the quarter-finals at Queen’s to have a chance of that — and he is on course to meet Berrettini again in the second round, unless Dan Evans beats the Italian tomorrow.
Murray has geared his season around giving himself the best shot on the grass and will meet up with old mentor Lendl in London this week. Irrespective of his situation was the evidence of what a talent there is in Berrettini, who became a huge crowd favourite at Wimbledon last year when he gave Novak Djokovic a proper challenge in the final before going down in four sets to the then world No1.
The 26-year- old has had injury woes himself and is only just coming back after minor surgery on a ligament in his hand that kept him out of the clay- court season. The strapping Roman’s trademarks are his huge serve and forehand, which also saw him defeat Cam Norrie in last year’s final at Queen’s.
He showed he has plenty more than that with his touch and drop shots that rarely allowed Murray to settle, even before the onset of the problems that afflicted the Scot early in the third set.
Berrettini broke early in the first and had points to go a double break up at 4-1. In the second set he had three break points at 4-4. It is ironic that if he had taken them then Murray could have gone down without doing himself any damage.
The Wimbledon finalist sent it into a decider when he played his one really poor game of the match at 5-6 in the second. A double fault contributed to him being broken to love to make it a three-setter.
The full extent of how much Murray has hurt his chances of recapturing former glories on Britain’s grass courts is likely to emerge in the next 24 hours.