As Novak Djokovic continues to slash his way through the undergrowth of the US Open with all the elan and power of a superhero, Andy Murray is taking a more circumspect route towards their expected showdown in the semi-final.
Djokovic gave up just three games to Marcel Granollers, in only 79 minutes, who announced later: “He couldn’t play better.” Many saw the performance as a chilling statement of intent, but Murray is not ceding tournament favouritism to Djokovic.
“I don’t know, it depends,” he says. “Rafa [Nadal] has played very well too. But I always say that in tennis . . . it doesn’t really matter what happened two days ago. You turn up on the day of the next match and you might feel awful. You never know. It doesn’t matter how you’ve played up to this point; you can always get better – or get worse. I saw some of [Djokovic’s] match today. It looked like he played extremely well. But the matches will get tougher now.”
A reasonable view might be that it will get tougher for Murray today than it will for Djokovic. The world No1 plays the No 21 seed, Mikhail Youzhny, who had to fight through five sets on Tuesday to get past Lleyton Hewitt, the 2001 US Open champion here on sentiment as much as on form. Murray, meanwhile, gets Stanislas Wawrinka. Murray shares the opinion that the Swiss, the No 9 seed, is making a good case for being regarded as his country’s best player.
That is one of the aftershocks of Roger Federer’s departure in three sets on Monday night; Wawrinka, for so long in his shadow, has been gifted the opportunity to express himself without the weight of comparison.
Murray says: “Clearly, if you look at the [points] race – and that’s normally a good indication of how things are going – he’s probably not that far behind Roger just now. Again, there’s a lot of tennis to be played between now and the end of the year. You have to make that assessment when the year is done. But yes, finishing the US Open most years Roger’s been pretty much close to being No 1 in the world, and that’s not the case this year.”
Memory can be poison or elixir in sport, and Murray recalls his most tortuous experience with Wawrinka with a curl of the lip. It was three years ago, on the Louis Armstrong court he dreads, and the Swiss put him out in the third round on a night when neither looked fully fit or healthy. Guardian Service
