Murray still hoping for return to top of the bill
Brit will not let Netflix show distract him Down Under
THE eve of tournament withdrawals of Ajla Tomljanovic and Paula Badosa have prompted talk that a curse of Netflix might be under way at the Australian Open.
The top Australian and Spaniard are two of the players featuring in the new Break Point series about the tour, and both have been forced out with injuries.
Andy Murray would desperately love to back up the curse theory by knocking out another of the documentary’s main participants, Matteo Berrettini, when they meet in the first round early tomorrow morning.
The 35-year- old is enthusiastic about that prospect, less so about the actual Netflix series portraying the lives of varied personalities on the circuit. It is not really his style.
‘ It’s not something that I’m desperate to get back to the hotel room and stick on, but I don’t know if I’m the person that it’s supposed to be aimed at. I’m not sure if I’ll ever watch it,’ reflected Murray.
‘I did find at times like last year when I was at tournaments there were a lot of people around the players. I don’t know how easy it is for people to be themselves. For me personally, if you stick 10 cameras around me I don’t feel like I’m going to be completely natural in that situation.’ Infinitely more important for the twice Wimbledon champion is to show that he amounts to more than the chorus-line player he was in 2022, which he ended ranked No 49 with a season match record of 26-19.
The year ended on a particularly dismal note when, playing the worst match one can ever recall from him, he lost at the indoor Paris Masters to Frenchman Gilles Simon, who was about to retire. Some might have been tempted after that to join Simon in smelling the roses and spending more time with the family. Murray instead responded by criticising his own training regimen and then took himself off to Florida for three weeks hard slog with his mentor, Ivan Lendl.
Unusually Lendl, who is a reluctant traveller, was persuaded to come early to Australia to supervise his player’s preparations for Melbourne.
Their time together had made Murray more optimistic that he can be more than someone making up the numbers.
‘It’s the first time in a while where I’ve had really six, seven weeks of work uninterrupted by anything, so I feel like I was able to make some improvements in the offseason and feel a bit more comfortable with my game,’ he said. ‘ For me it’s great that Ivan was obviously out here early so we can do a proper build-up together.’
Murray’s problem is that, despite accepting copious wildcards, he has not been able to build his ranking to a place where he is seeded. Hence these first rounds against the enormous serve-forehand combination of Berrettini, the 2021 Wimbledon finalist.
In truth there has not been much evidence that Murray can match athletes such as Novak Djokovic and Lionel Messi in maintaining stratospheric standards deep into their mid-30s, but then neither of them has the major handicap of performing with a metal hip.
Intriguingly, Murray feels that this part of his anatomy is actually improving with the passage of time, as his body gets more and more used to what is inside him. The downside is that he has to tailor his training preparation accordingly.
‘There have been a few things I’ve had to adjust but I do think that now my body is used to having the metal hip I’m not getting so many aches and pains.
‘Which is interesting, because if you talk about the ageing process, when I was 33 I was getting way more issues with my body than I’m getting now at 35 and a half, just because my body is used to the new hip. If I watch Rafa (Nadal) and Novak moving around the court, they don’t look much slower to me based on their age, but obviously there are restrictions that I have because of the surgery.
‘In a training week I will work for five days and take two days off. Whereas before it was five and a half days or six days. My days are slightly shorter. I don’t do any running or impact work away from the court, when in my early to mid-20s I did a lot of work on the running track.
‘I do some bike and use the vertical climber a lot but I do no squatting with weights on my shoulders any more. I feel much better when I walk on to the court in terms of how I’m going to play and my understanding of what I need to do to be successful.’
His match against Berrettini is a repeat of the US Open third-round meeting when he lost to the Italian in four tight sets.
Murray is one of five British men directly into the main draw, with Kyle Edmund, Cam Norrie, Jack Draper and Dan Evans — the highest GB male representation since 1988.