On Sunday night Andy Murray stood under the bright lights of Ashe Stadium. He looked crisp in light blue, and he played even more crisply in slicing up that bull in a China closet named Taylor Dent. The spotlight seemed to sharpen the Scot, in both style and substance.
This afternoon in Ashe, the sky was hazy and gray, and Murray’s game followed suit again. In losing to Marin Cilic 7-5, 6-2, 6-2, the No. 2 seed was as sluggish and unfocused as he’s been all year. He said he’d been troubled by a wrist problem for a week, and by a lack of energy in each of his last two matches. I didn’t notice the wrist problems, but the emotional and physical flatness was obvious throughout the last two sets.
Still, it was what happened at the end of the first set that spelled the difference. Up 5-4, 15-40, Murray had two sets points on Cilic’s serve. Until this moment, the match had been going according to the expected script. Cilic, who had never beaten his opponent in three meetings, was “shanking a lot of forehands,” as Murray put it afterward. But the Croat extricated himself with an ace and a well-played point to make it 5-5. Winning this type of game will usually help a player relax, but nobody expected Cilic to relax quite as comprehensively as he did. He went on to play the two best sets of his life. “I’ve never seen him hit the ball so cleanly,” Murray said.
I spent the match watching from a press seat that's lined up with the baseline at the south end of the stadium. This vantage point was telling, particularly when Cilic was on my side of the court. He was obviously hitting the ball well, but he was also playing intelligently and taking advantage of exactly what Murray was giving him, without overcooking it. On many of the rallies, he would set up on top of the baseline, take a floating Murray slice, and hit a penetrating forehand to the inside-out corner. On most occasions, this was enough either to win him the point or put him in an aggressive position. But if it wasn’t, Cilic didn’t feel the need, like so many players, to keep hitting the ball harder and harder and with less and less margin on each subsequent shot—that's a mistake which Murray has built a career on. Instead, if the Scot returned his foray with any kind of depth, Cilic would back off, slice the ball back down the middle, and start his attack over. He said afterward that he was happy that he’d “moved into the court” and “moved him around,” but that when he was “in a tough position, he’d stay in the rally.” Of course, Cilic also bashed aces and on many points he didn't need to step back at all. He would just send the first forehand he saw blazing into the corner for a blatant winner.
All of this is a testament to Cilic’s patience and the tactical acumen he brought to this match. His longtime coach, Bob Brett, has always lauded his intelligence and willingness to do what it takes to get better and not take short cuts. The trouble was, as Murray noted today, that Cilic simply gave away too many points with his loopy, busy ground strokes. He didn’t hit the ball cleanly enough for long enough to go deep at a Grand Slam. In his presser today, Cilic said with a laugh that he was relieved to finally get past the round of 16 at a major—this was his fifth trip there—and get that “blockade” out of his head.
But Cilic’s ability to choose his tactics from the baseline today, to have the opportunity to press forward and then step back, is also a testament to how much time and turf Murray gives up in a rally. This season has been his most defensive, on clay, hard, and even grass courts. He’s relied on his speed, his ability to counterpunch in a varied and crafty way that can’t easily be attacked, and a return of serve that he uses as a forcing weapon. The formula has worked on most days; Murray is 53-8 in 2009. But it’s also a tactic that’s predicated on his opponents ultimately making a mistake or giving him an opening, and those aren’t as easy to come by at the Grand Slams. Everyone in the Top 15 or 20 has arranged their schedules to peak for these two weeks. Over the course of seven matches, you’re virtually guaranteed to come across at least one player who is dialed in. And Murray has: His four Slam losses this year all came to guys who were playing above their normal levels. His passive style is a giving one, for better and for worse—Murray gives his opponents a chance to self-destruct, but he also gives them a chance to find their best form.
Murray, hunched low and with his voice even lower, spoke in his usual inflectionless, philosophical monotone in his press conference afterward. Asked if this was the biggest disappointment of his career, he said, with the ultimate in matter-of-factness, “My tennis career, yeah.” Asked a few seconds later what he would learn from this U.S. Open and this match, he said, “I’ll go and sit down with the guys that I work with and see what went well this whole year and what didn’t go so well, and work as hard as I can on it to be ready to win a Slam in Australia.” Murray also stated that he was very pleased with his season overall.
On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with these statements. What else can he say, really? But to hear Murray deliver them so flatly, after watching him play with so little fire, I started to wonder if he’s thinking too long term, if he’s putting his progress and his setbacks in too much perspective. There’s no one more rigorous, even-keeled, or methodical in his training than Murray is right now. It’s almost as if he’s trying to take his famously edgy emotions, which overtook him on more than a few occasions in the past, out of the equation. When your focus is the long view at all costs—notice that Murray didn’t say what he would learn from this Open, but from the season as a whole—you can treat each loss as just another in an inevitable chain of losses. Murray stopped short of saying afterward that he couldn’t do anything out there against Cilic, or that his opponent was simply playing too well. But that’s how Murray looked when he was playing; he and his entourage exchanged bitter smiles after a few of Cilic's winners.
At 2-3 in the third, already down a break, Murray ran out early after the changeover and fired himself up when Cilic shanked a backhand to make it 0-15. On the next point, though, he missed an easy forehand long, and the surge was over after one point. It was clearly way past time for a Plan B; but what Plan B would Murray have instituted? From where he’s used to playing on the court, it would take an eternity for him to work himself into the net. At most tournaments, you can lose and still believe that your overall system is working, that it will even out in the long term. But there’s no long term when it comes to Grand Slams. If, like Andy Murray, you want to win a few of them—most top guys have about 40 decent shots at the majors during their career—you don’t have that luxury. You have to live in the here and now.