Andy Murray walloped by Milos Raonic to end comeback win streak
If you were working solely on statistics, you might have backed Andy Murray to beat Milos Raonic last night. Not only had Murray won his past eight official matches – a streak that extended over a 10-month period – but he had also beaten Raonic in their past eight meetings.
Both those sequences were comprehensively squashed, however, as Raonic handed out a 6-2, 6-2 shellacking at the Western and Southern Open in New York. Even a torrential thunderstorm in the middle of the match did not knock him out of his punishing rhythm.
Murray had been forced to dig deep into his physical reserves during a tense three-setter against Alexander Zverev on Monday night. In all probability, that played a role in his slow start. He opened with a double-fault, and could not find any timing on his groundstrokes from the back of the court.
What didn’t help was that Raonic was serving absolute bombs – his first serve averaged 140mph during the opening set – while also going for maximum power on almost every groundstroke.
This is the best way to play Murray. He likes to assemble rallies incrementally as if they were jigsaw puzzles. So the canny ploy is to create a staccato feel to the match, taking the racket out of his hand with a death-or-glory approach. Last night, Raonic kept coming up with glory.
The only slight upswing in Murray’s ball-striking came in the middle of the second set. He lengthened a couple of rallies, and even brought up two break points at 15-40 in the sixth game. But Raonic responded magnificently, not only producing unreturnable serves but also maintaining great pace and depth from the baseline. On one key point, Murray drove a backhand straight at his opponent as hard as he could, only for the world No 30 to produce a lovely drop volley.
After the match, Murray said that he had recovered reasonably well from the Zverev match. He had been a little weary, he admitted, before adding that his tiredness was not enough to explain the poor standard of his play. He hit only seven winners to place against 21 unforced errors.
“I was hitting some pretty bad tennis shots,” said Murray, who will now try to address some of his shortcomings in the brief space of time before the US Open starts on Monday.
“I am not happy with that level of performance. The positive is that I got three matches in [this week], and my hip felt good. But I have much higher standards than that and it wasn’t good enough tonight. Normally I am quite good at building points and being consistent but I made a lot of mistakes tonight.”
Raonic’s post-match verdict was that Murray hadn’t been changing direction as quickly as he used to in the past. But the Canadian, who had not beaten Murray since 2012, also suggested that this could be a question of match-tightness rather than any physical deterioration.
“Theres a piece of metal in his hip, but he is still getting out there and performing," Raonic said. "He gives a lot of people an understanding of what it really takes and how much heart he has.”
