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| 29/04/2009 18:05 |
| ANDY MURRAY: “I KNEW IT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN SOMETIME” |
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After crashing out 1-6, 6-3, 7-5 to qualifier Juan Monaco, Andy Murray was nevertheless in an upbeat mood as he looked to the rest of the clay season.
“Conditions changed a lot during the match,” said the No4 seed, who got off to a flying start before getting bogged down in the second set. “You look at the court during the first set and it was very heavy and very damp. At the end, it was really dry, quite slippy and much quicker conditions. That might explain a little bit why it was a bit of a different standard of tennis played. Maybe when the courts dried out he was able to dictate more of the points. I'm not saying the conditions were the reason I lost the match. It was just very different to what it was at the start. The last five or six days when we were practising, the weather had been damp and the courts were slow, and then it was obviously much quicker at the end. Maybe that's where I made a few more errors. I don't mind whether the clay is quicker or slower – it just changed a lot during the match.”
Despite going out at this early stage, Murray refused to be downhearted and took the positives from the match. “It wasn't my best but I was still very close to winning. I've found ways of coming through when I haven't been playing my best early in tournaments this year. On the clay, that's something that I need to try and work out a little bit more. But I’m not going to be too disappointed. I would have liked to have got my run going, but I've had a great eight months and haven't lost early for a long time. I knew it was going to happen sometime. I’ve just got to move on and realize that I've been playing much better this year than I was last year on clay and work hard for Madrid.”
Murray also mentioned some problems adjusting to a new racquet, though he refused to lay the blame on either his equipment or on the foot-fault call at 5-5 in the final set which led to his being broken to love. “I'm playing with new racquets this week - the same weight and balance but it's just always when you get new racquets it takes time,” he said. “You have to string them three or four times before they come out the right way because the grommets are new.”
“I don't move my left foot when I serve, so I don't get foot faulted very often,” he continued. “If I was foot faulting, I was foot faulting. It was just quite surprising that after two hours and forty minutes we'd been playing and I had one, and it came out of nowhere. I missed the next four first serves but that's bad concentration from me - something that I need to get better at.” |
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