Murderous Murray

The way things have been going this week in London at the ATP World Tour Finals, you couldn’t blame tennis enthusiasts from wanting to rename O2 Arena the O2 Abattoir. The place has been nothing less than a slaughterhouse.

We’re three full days into the tournament and not a single match has gone three sets. By the time the crowd filed in tonight for Tuesday’s evening match between No. 5 seed Andy Murray and No. 7 Milos Raonic, the more optimistic spectators were secretly hoping to see at least a tiebreaker. Not that it guaranteed any dramatics. In the only tiebreaker played thus far this week, Roger Federer clobbered Raonic without the loss of a point, 7-0.

On paper, Murray’s match with Raonic looked promising. Both men were fighting for their round-robin lives, having absorbed beatings in their opening matches. Ominously for the home crowd, Raonic had won three of his last four meetings with Murray, who hardly looked menacing in the course of a 6-4, 6-4 loss to World Tour Final first-timer Kei Nishikori on opening day. Murray’s death march to make the elite eight, which had him playing six tournaments in as many weeks, might have left him incapable of winning the darned thing, the theory went.

Not so, as we saw today.

Murray was in a wolfish mood throughout his match with the baby-faced Canadian, who like Nishikori and Marin Cilic is playing in his first World Tour Finals. Periodically throughout this match Murray made wisecracks under his breath and shot arch looks toward his bench. Perhaps he’s finally decided that a choice bon mot is a more useful expletive than the F-word, or maybe he just wanted to show the newcomer that the O2 Arena is his Abbatoir—one in which Murray feels safe, secure, and capable of dealing cavalierly with anything Raonic might devise.

Well, Murray certainly accomplished that in his 6-3, 7-5 win. He kept the big-serving Raonic tethered to a 68 percent success rate on first serves, and prevented him from breaking even when he was obliged to hit second serves. Raonic won just 48 percent of his second serves on a day when his first-serve percentage was a dismal 53 percent.

Murray broke to take a 4-2 lead in the first set and went on to serve it out undramatically. It did consume 37 minutes, making it one of the more of more lengthy sets of the tournament. Murray seemed ready to do a little better in the second set when he broke Raonic in the third game—one that ought to make it onto the ultimate tennis blooper reel.

After each man held for their opening service games of the set, Raonic build a 40-0 lead in the third game. But he made a careless error here and a bonehead play there, and Murray had crept to 40-30. During the ensuing point, Raonic took a big cut at an inside-out forehand while moving forward toward the net—and drove the ball somewhere in the vicinity of Calais. What could be worse? Try a double fault, followed by an inside-out forehand error hit while poor Raonic was backpedaling as if it were not a tennis ball approaching, but some kind of explosive device.

But this is Murray we’re talking about here, so it should hardly come as a surprise that in the very next game Raonic got a look at his first break point. He wasted no time converting it thanks to a backhand error by Murray. Perhaps it was “opposite day” in London, for Murray’s backhand was less reliable than his forehand, and it was Raonic’s go-to forehand that undermined his chances time and again.

From that 2-2 juncture on, Raonic lifted his game and it appeared that the tournament might produce its first three-setter after all. In both the sixth and eighth games, Raonic pinned Murray to 0-30 deficits, but Murray managed to serve his way out of trouble, thanks partly to Raonic’s generous serve return errors. We seemed to be heading for a tiebreaker.

But as I said before, this is Murray we’re talking about here.

At 5-all with Raonic serving, Murray ran down an approach shot and managed a desperate forehand get. He reversed direction and sprinted toward his unguarded backhand corner, the ball already on its way there off Raonic’s racquet. Murray appeared to run through the ball, yet he managed in one swift motion to flick a cross-court backhand past Raonic at an extreme angle, his left hand guiding the racquet head around the outside of the ball. It was a marvelous demonstration of instinct married to skill.

The crowd loved that moment, Raonic less so. Distracted, he drove a forehand wide to lose the next point. Murray wasted a good chance on the next point, flubbing a backhand second-serve return, but Raonic was in a generous mood. He misplayed a third-shot backhand off Murray’s next return and the Scot secured the unexpected break when Raonic failed to make a tough half-volley off a dipping backhand pass.

This time, Murray consolidated the break with little trouble on his second match point. By the standards of this blood-drenched week, the 90-minute match was a regular epic. With Novak Djokovic on deck tomorrow, I’m guessing that its status will be safe.