TENNIS:ANDY MURRAY has been saying all week, in the course of struggling through 13 sets in three matches, that he finds inspiration in adversity. However, he discovered against the determined Czech Tomas Berdych, in darkness a burglar would welcome, that you can have too much of a bad thing and he is out of this French Open.
Berdych, seeded 15th, won 6-4, 7-5, 6-3 in two hours 16 minutes spread over most of the evening session, with a 35-minute break for rain that clearly unsettled Murray, as did the damp, shifting clay and . . .. well, his own imperfect game.
They finished in gloom that matched Murray’s mood, although no amount of crazy scheduling could be blamed for the fourth seed’s capitulation. He simply could not find the extra gear he needed to subdue an opponent whose concentration was barely disturbed from start to finish.
Berdych, who beat Murray twice as a teenager, deserves to go through to the quarter-finals, where he will play the fifth-seeded Mikhail Youzhny.
The internal conversation Murray was having with himself towards the end was a gnarled narrative of anger and frustration. His hair, turned into a bird’s nest by the humidity, sat atop a scowling face embroidered with wisps of beard growth. He looked dishevelled in every way compared to the Czech, whose clean-cut looks mirrored his uncluttered game.
All around him yesterday, Murray’s peers and rivals on that side of the draw – Roger Federer, Robin Soderling and Youzhny – moved through to the quarter-finals with relative ease.
Federer, who dismissed his friend Stan Wawrinka with barely a flick of his incredible wrists, is yet to drop a set. Soderling had his third three-set win, faltering briefly in putting out the brittle Marin Cilic. Only Youzhny has had it tough in the first week – but then he was gifted a free pass after just one set yesterday, when Jo-Wilfried Tsonga withdrew with a groin injury.
Murray’s serve swung between wobbly and wonderful in the first set, and he had to save three break points in an opening game that lasted seven minutes, double-faulting before aceing Berdych to hold. Just when his game started to click, he gave up another three points at 3-3. The Czech choked on the forehand but Murray put his backhand into the net to drop serve. Murray changed his racquet but not the course of the match.
Berdych held, then had another two set points on Murray’s serve but could not finish him. As Richard Gasquet, Juan Ignacio Chela and Marcos Baghdatis have learned to their cost this week, such charity can prove costly.
However, Berdych served out to love to take the first set 6-4, then broke him at the start of the second. Steady rain forced them off for the first time before 8pm local time. When they came back, Berdych broke Murray for the second time in the set to go 6-5 up.
The Czech served out for the set, then cruised through the third. In contrast, it took defending champion Federer only 27 minutes to wrap up the third set 6-2 against Wawrinka to complete a performance in which he was only briefly inconvenienced, dropping a game in the second.
Cilic, one of the game’s great strollers, could not match Soderling’s intensity. The Swede’s 6-4, 6-4, 6-2 win was sound preparation for a rematch in the quarter-finals with Federer.
Youzhny has made a couple of finals this year. When Tsonga pulled up with a groin strain after failing to chase down a ball behind the baseline, he withdrew after half an hour.
