There was a moment in the middle of the first set that made me think Andy Murray might be in good shape. He was up a break at 4-3, but down break point at 30-40. He had just double-faulted. The match seemed poised to turn, maybe decisively, in his opponent Roger Federer’s direction. Federer had started poorly, nearly shanking his way to a love-3 start, but Murray had allowed him to hang around and stay within one break of serve. Now it appeared that Federer, as he has done so many times in the past, would be able to ride out a bad patch of play unscathed. Once he does that, we know what’s next: full-flight Federer time, and nobody wants to be on the other side of the net when that starts.
Certainly not Murray, who, while earning an early lead, wasn't yet fully confident in what he was doing. He’d been playing even more passively than usual, and he'd been lucky to escape with a hold at 3-1 when Federer dumped an easy drop shot into the net at break point. Now Murray faced another break point at 4-3. This time he took a little extra time setting up. He reached back a little farther than normal with his backswing. He went right for his favorite spot, out wide in the ad court, and painted the sideline for an ace. Murray turned around and muttered a few possibly profane words to himself. We’re used to seeing him do this when he’s angry or frustrated, and we’re used to seeing him do it in the direction of his player box. But this time he was muttering to himself, and he was doing it with an edge of determination rather than anger. For the ever-dour Scot, this is called pumping yourself up. Murray held. Then he broke for the set with two running forehand passes. Announcer Robbie Koenig called the first one “miraculous.” The second one was even better. He’d reached full confidence.
But just as in the first set, Murray won the second with the kind of big-point grit and resolve that we didn’t see from him at the U.S. Open last month. He went down 15-40 in each of his first two service games. In the first, he hit a big forehand to save one break point, and in the second he came up with a backhand winner up the line to save another. In both games, he again reached back and hit aces when he needed them. Saving those break points loosened Murray up even as squandering them left Federer increasingly testy. Rightfully so: Down a break point at 1-2, Federer thought he’d won a point with an easy overhead, only to hear that the base linesman had incorrectly called his previous shot out. The point was replayed, Federer sailed a forehand wide, and a couple of minutes later Murray was up 4-1 and the match was all but over. Bad break. What made it worse was that Federer had already given that linesman a glare for missing an out call a few games earlier. Now there was nothing Federer could do but glare harder.
Afterward he said, “missing so many important shots, over and over, took a lot of my confidence away.” Federer was missing them right from the beginning. His first shanked forehand came at 40-30 in the opening game. The second one came on the next point. By the time he was down 0-2, Federer was shadow-stroking his forehand to try to smooth it out, even as the shanks started to spread to his backhand side, and even to his overhead—he sent a sitter off the throat of his racquet and over the baseline at 2-4. While Federer steadied himself eventually, he did, like he said, commit some surprising errors on important points. The most surprising and important of them was a hanging forehand that he sent 5-feet long for no apparent reason. Federer put his hands on his hips and stared in disbelief. It was that kind of day. He ended it with twice as many errors as winners. He was zero for six on break points. For anyone who thought he should have gotten in more, that wasn’t going to work, either—Federer won just 13 of the 24 points when he made his way forward. Most stunning of all, he had a 27-percent success rate on second-serve points.
Shanghai was a mixed signal from Federer. He reasserted his authority of Novak Djokovic in the semis; it’s clear to me that Djokovic must play above his norm, the way he did at the Open, to beat Federer. Otherwise, he winds up playing the lion’s share of the rallies on his heels. Federer also reclaimed the No. 2 ranking and began his fall campaign with a lot of good tennis. And while no big changes have been made to his game, he has presumably begun to settle in with Paul Annacone. At the same time, Federer lost his second straight Masters final of 2010 to Murray, and, while this one was closer than the score indicated, it wasn’t exactly close. As we’ve known for a while, the long victory streaks are over, and the occasional days of unexplained shanks are here to stay. None of this is new for Federer; all Murray has done is to make their match at a major that much more intriguing and pressure-filled. A showdown between them in London next month is a potential highlight of that event, and like their match there in 2009, which Federer won, it could set the stage for another encounter at the Australian Open.
Murray won’t worry about the future today. Once he relaxed in the middle of the first set, he played a masterful match in all ways, and he did it without “getting more aggressive,” which is what everyone, myself included, has been telling him to do for weeks, months, years. It’s not going to happen anytime soon. Murray’s going to live and die with his counter-puncher’s game. It’s the way he plays, the mindset he has, the speed and strokes he uses. Today it all worked. More than that, though, if we stop to watch Murray’s game closely and stop worrying about what he’s not doing, it only gets more interesting.
Murray is, as I said, a counter-puncher, an anti-authority type. He uses his opponent’s game rather than dictating play. His return, rather than his serve, has always been his signature shot. But unlike a counter-puncher such as Jimmy Connors, who took the pace of his opponents and flung it back in their faces with a grunt, Murray works in subtler ways. Federer said after the match that, “the target seemed to get smaller and smaller and that’s a credit to him.” What makes Murray unique is that while he plays from a defensive position and uses his speed as a weapon, he’s not a grinder. He doesn’t hit the ball with heavy topspin and put it in the same place every time. He changes speeds with his shots almost unthinkingly. He can rally with moderate pace from the middle of the court, but if he’s forced to run to his right, he’ll suddenly smack the ball back with considerably more oomph. Just when you think you have him is exactly when you don’t have him, and that’s a tough thing for an opponent to work around. Likewise, on the backhand side, Murray will be satisfied to chip the ball or loop it back a dozen straight times, but he also possesses a flatter version of the shot, almost a two-handed forehand, and he caught Federer off guard with it a number of times today.
Murray’s 2010 has seemed like 10 years in one, and it’s not even over. He was up in Melbourne, then way down until Wimbledon. He reached another peak in Toronto, then tumbled again at the Open. But he's never been higher than he was today at the end of the first set. With Murray off the court, Federer hit what he had to think was a winning volley. With his long strides, Murray raced from off camera toward the ball, but you never actually thought he was going to reach it until you saw it come off his strings and slide crosscourt, past Federer, and dive inside the sideline. Koenig went berserk, yelling something unintelligible. I had one of those automatic, I-can’t-help-myself spectator moments, blurting out “Oh my God!” and snapping my head up at the ceiling. Whatever disappointments have come in the past, whatever may come in the future, whatever flaws he may have in his game, all of it could be forgotten today. Whether he was reaching back for a serve, muttering a curse of determination, or hitting a miraculous pass, it was a good day to watch Andy Murray play tennis.