Murray was far from his best Friday, but he simply refused to lose

LONDON—”It was an up and down match,” a bug-eyed and exhausted Andy Murray said after beating Fabio Fognini in a suspenseful third-rounder here on Friday. “It probably wasn’t the best tennis, but at the end, it was very tense.”

The scores don’t quite do justice to the roller-coaster quality of this one. Murray won a four-setter, 6-2, 4-6, 6-1, 7-5, in two hours and 39 minutes, but the match looked all but guaranteed to go on for much longer. Fognini led 5-2 in the fourth set, and had five set points to push it to a decider.

As far as quality goes, Murray’s right: He could have played better. He was on his back foot most of the time—he hit just 26 winners to Fognini’s 44—and said he didn’t feel like he moved as well as he has been. Fognini? He was his customary mercurial self, the perfectly insouciant tormentor for this jumpy, nail-biting Centre Court crowd. He was brilliant for stretches, as he launched explosive ground-stroke attacks with no warning and the shortest of backswings; they kept Murray shuffling like a hockey goalie along the baseline. Fognini won 24 of 32 points at the net, while Murray made it up there just 15 times.

“It’s difficult to see when he’s going to generate pace,” Murray said.

But as has been true many times before, Fognini couldn’t make the shot, or win the point, he needed most. After squandering two set points at 2-5, Fognini had another on his serve at 5-3. Murray’s return appeared to be floating long, but it landed on the baseline. Fognini called for a challenge, not realizing that he was out them. Instead of continuing the rally, he lost the point, and he seemed to lose heart from there.

Until then, though, Fognini had competed. After losing the first and third sets, he had kept his head in the match and outplayed Murray in the second set, and through the first seven games of the fourth. It was only Murray’s stubborn determination not to let the match go five sets—and almost certainly be forced to finish under the roof due to darkness—that stopped Fognini in the end.

Two days ago, after Murray’s last victory, I wrote that few athletes internalize and use pressure as effectively as Murray does at Wimbledon. And few tennis players have so consistently raised their games at one tournament. Murray didn’t raise his game in this one, so much as he simply refused to lose, whatever his level happened to be. Would he have won that fourth set anywhere but in front of 15,000 home folks pushing him toward the finish line?

I also wrote after his last match that while Murray might not be playing like a favorite at Wimbledon, at least he’s playing like a defending champion, and that was even more true on Friday.

“I’m happy to be in the second week,” Murray said. “Anything can happen from here.”

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