Andy Murray tells the Daily Mail that it took him several months to get over his straight-sets loss to Novak Djokovic in the Australian Open final.
"I don’t think a defeat has ever taken longer to get out of my system," said Murray, who suffered three consecutive first-round losses after he left Melbourne. "The Australian Open takes place in January, so in December I decamped to Miami to prepare. I spent Christmas Day alone, running on the beach. It could be worse, I know, but everyone else is with their family, and all you keep thinking is, 'Don’t worry, it’s all going to be worthwhile.' So to get so close and lose hits you doubly hard, because of all you’ve given up. All that effort for not quite. Then everyone wants to console you, which is the last thing you need. You really don’t want to hear, 'You’re doing great and it’s going to happen if you keep working hard' because you’re thinking, 'Look, I am working hard, and it hasn’t happened, so don’t keep telling me that.' There are moments when you don’t want pepping up, you don’t even want to speak to people. There is nobody who can help. You are the only one who can deal with it. By March, I simply felt terrible. I hated practicing. Everything was wrong."