TENNIS:ANDY MURRAY says he likes a fight. Well, he has got one against Novak Djokovic here tomorrow, one that will determine who contests the final of the 2012 Australian Open and leave the loser utterly spent.
This, though, is a physical confrontation with more at stake than a goblet. It provides Murray with a chance to erase the memory of his humiliation against the Serb here a year ago, a defeat that sent him into a brief spiral of despair from which he did well to emerge a stronger and better player.
On the eve of this tournament Murray sounded reborn when he said: “Win like a man, lose like a man,” a proposition still untested after five relatively straightforward wins and a single dropped set.
However, when he meets the world number one in the second semi-final – his third in succession here and fifth in a row in majors – not only will they both be inspired by knowing the winner of the showdown between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal today and thus their prospective opponent in the final on Sunday but they will bring to the Rod Laver Arena a raw aggression neither has been required to show fully the past week or so.
Before the quarter-finals Murray had beaten a feisty American teenager, Ryan Harrison, given up only 15 games against the elegant but ultimately outclassed Frenchmen Edouard Roger-Vasselin and Michael Llodra and had the luxury of a 49-minute retirement win over the 92nd-ranked Mikhail Kukushkin. They were mere spars. Yesterday it was the turn of the promising Kei Nishikori who, weighed down by a five-setter against Jo-Wilfried Tsonga two days earlier, was left gasping after two hours and 12 minutes, hardly a marathon.
Murray won 6-3, 6-3, 6-1 and, apart from struggling with his service game and a cricked neck, hit some wicked groundstrokes, possibly as hard as he has struck in all his years as a professional.
Djokovic, meanwhile, has been pushed hardest after dropping a set against Lleyton Hewitt and looking physically distressed in his quarter-final yesterday against the Tour’s acknowledged bruiser, David Ferrer, before finishing him off 6-4, 7-6, 6-1 in two hours 44 minutes. “It was just a sudden pain,” he said of pulling up quickly to tend his thigh. “I feel very fit and I feel mentally, as well, very fresh.”
There was also a worrying pause to catch his breath. “I found it difficult after a long time to breathe because I felt the whole day my nose was closed a little bit. I just wasn’t able to get enough oxygen.”
In the past few days Murray has spoken about the brutality of his sport, expressing no sympathy, for instance, for Tomas Berdych, who refused to shake hands with Nicolas Almagro after a fractious match in which the Spaniard belted a volley straight at him, knocking him on his backside.
“Like Almagro said after the match,” Murray wrote in his column in the Australian newspaper, “he was just trying to win the point.” Would he do the same to Djokovic, his friend since their early teens and with whom he played five-a-side before last year’s crushing encounter? “If it means hitting them with a passing shot like Almagro did with Berdych . . . you just have to do whatever you have to do.”
The Scot has always embraced the ugly demands of his sport but there would seem to be a connection between this newly-expressed machismo and the arrival of Ivan Lendl, a stone-faced hard man who came from behind the old Iron Curtain to terrorise his peers and who, as a silent, brooding mentor, has the bedside manner of Dracula.
“The reason for employing him was to give me an extra edge,” Murray said, “to have someone in my corner who has been through the same things.”
While Murray wants to bury some ghosts, he said: “You want to move on from what’s happened in the past but you also need to learn from it as well. I won’t be going to the match thinking about last year’s final. We’ll soon see whether I’ve closed the gap or not.”
One thing is certain: Murray has picked the right cornerman for this fight.
