NEW YORK—Andy Murray has a pyromaniac’s heart, but it’s a good thing that he only exercises his deep and seemingly incurable tendency to play with matches at tennis tournaments.
Take today. Murray, the No. 3 seed, was firmly in control of his third-round match with Spanish pin-up Feliciano Lopez after rolling through a pair of 7-5 tiebreakers, and he broke Lopez’s serve—and seemingly his spirit—when a Lopez double fault at break point gave Murray a 2-0 lead in the third.
It was time to sink the blade to the hilt; instead, Murray fumbled in his pocket and came up with his book of matches. He swiftly fell behind 0-40, and when he clubbed a Lopez service return wide one point later, he let go an agonized roar of disgust and, upon walking to his chair, smashed his racquet against his Head bag.
It was time to start the fire and let it smoke and smolder, see how close Murray could come to actually blowing it against a guy who’d taken just one set off him in six previous meetings, and that more than two years ago.
“I was just trying to play my best game,” Lopez, the No. 30 seed, said later. “I was confused (in the past) about how to play him because he’s a tough one. He does everything very good, he reads the game good, and he returns my serving good.”
Lopez succeeded in his undertaking. He pressed Murray, closing on the net at every opportunity. He took his chances from the baseline, refusing Murray’s invitation to engage in rallies. He also took advantage of a decline in Murray’s game, and as a result the Scot came pretty close to going down in flames.
From 2-1 in the third, the match did a fair impersonation of a bad WTA match, with three breaks (two by Lopez) in the next six games. By the end of that run, Lopez had reeled off 12 of the last 15 points and salted away the set, 6-4. He looked much fitter, as well as more confident. Murray was gasping, as if suffering from smoke inhalation.
Lopez also had a break point in the first game of the fourth set, but Murray dodged it. Murray also double-faulted to present Lopez with another break point in the fifth game. He wriggled out of that one, too, and surviving that crisis proved a turning point of sorts. Murray’s level of energy rose, and the flickering flames that threatened to engulf him just minutes earlier began to wane.
“He was looking really tired at the end of the third set,” Lopez said. “I was feeling that I had a good chance if I could get to a fifth, but then he seemed to recover near the end of the fourth. He was running again, and serving better. It happens that way sometimes in a best of five. One set you feel like you are in another world, and then the next one you are recovered. You feel fresh, and better. You can run.”
In Murray’s case, though, the transition from alert and aggressive competitor into passive, howling victim of mostly self-inflicted torture can be surprisingly swift. It’s as if he suddenly runs out of the basic inspiration that motivates all players, or perhaps he just needs to put himself at risk in order to remind himself of what he’s trying to accomplish out there.
In all fairness, though, Lopez also found his game and began to frustrate Murray with a combination of unusual (for Lopez) consistency and a threatening opportunism. “He was starting to play better as the match went on,” Murray said later. “So it was a very challenging match. I felt better at the end than I did halfway through it.”
The end couldn’t have come sooner for the recent Olympic gold medalist. He reached the haven of the fourth-set tiebreaker with no further drama. After a quick exchange of mini-breaks, the men held serve until Murray nosed out front, 5-4 on serve.
Lopez then missed his first serve, but forged ahead behind a sizzling forehand approach, cross-court. It seemed like the right play for the man who had approached the net 50 times during the match and come out on top 37 times, but Murray ripped off a backhand passing shot that Lopez was unable to touch. Lopez then lost the match on an ill-advised drop shot from the baseline.
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