A way to defeat the huge serving machine – and Hawk-eye too

out there still – chances were as rare as fish fur as neither man was giving an inch. But that break allowed Murray to edge past his mighty foe 7-6, 6-4, 5-7, 6-4.

When Karlovic first started out on the tour, he was only 6ft 10ins. He was still the tallest man on the circuit and, to recognise the fact, he had “6’ 10’ ” embroidered on his shorts. He was a big lad and proud of it. But then along came John Isner from the United States.

Big John was first listed at a lofty 6ft 9ins but that turned out only to be his height when he was still a growing boy at college. He shot up another inch after he graduated but no one at the ATP seemed to notice. After Isner had banged on about the mistake for a while, the ATP finally changed his profile data in 2013 and bumped him up to 6ft 10ins. Karlovic was not happy.

Within a few weeks, Karlovic, too, had grown. He was now listed as 6ft 11ins and was returned to his position as the tour’s tallest man. Either he had started eating his greens or he was having a very late growth spurt (he was 34 when all of this palaver was going on) but however the ATP decided it, Karlovic was now officially huge. Serving from such a great height gives Karlovic a unique advantage as no one else can find angles like the big man. In order to replicate the sort of barrage he was likely to endure – the Croat had served 136 aces in his first three rounds and banged down another 29 yesterday – Murray had his team serve at him from the service line.

That may sound a little like telling your children to go and play in the traffic in order to teach them road sense, but it worked a treat.

Murray won more than half of the return points he played and, against Karlovic, that is impressive. But he also passed the Croat as he came lurching into the net and he lobbed him time and time again.

To get the ball up and over Karlovic and his enormous reach and then get it to drop like a feather into the corner of the court was impressive; to do it with such staggering regularity was remarkable. It kept Karlovic guessing: if he came in too close to the net, he was lobbed; if he did not come in close enough, he was passed. What to do?

What Karlovic did was serve. In the face of such relentless pressure – Karlovic thumped 64 unreturned serves along with his 29 aces – Murray was bound to blink once or twice. Two errors at the end of the third set cost him his serve and the set, but they were two of only nine in a three-hour match. Murray was as neat and tidy as it was possible to be.

Flinging himself at every serve in the fourth set, desperate to get a racket string on the ball and make Karlovic play another ball, he got his reward in the seventh game with a break point.

And then Karlovic hit that volley, Hawk-eye called it out and Murray was through to the quarter-finals. It had been a very good day indeed for the former Wimbledon champion.