Murray: ‘You Have To Back Yourself’

“You have to back yourself,” Andy Murray said after overcoming Frenchman Mathias Bourgue in five sets at Roland Garros on Wednesday. “For me today it wasn’t easy, because I wasn’t hitting the ball well for a long period of the match.”

Murray came into the second-round encounter as the prohibitive favourite. Bourgue, No. 164 in the Emirates ATP Rankings, had never played in the main draw of a tour-level event and was facing a Top 50 player for the first time, but the Frenchman found his best level to take a two-set-to-one lead against Murray. To the Brit’s credit, he remained calm and let his talent do the talking.

“Over the course of five sets, the higher-ranked player can be a little bit more solid, a bit more consistent in the important moments,” Murray, who now has 576 wins under his belt, noted. “In the end, in the fifth set, that was the difference. I came up with some good shots and some lucky shots as well.”

Despite being the highest seed in his half of the draw, the World No. 2 has not had it easy in Paris so far. It was his second straight five-set escape after he saw off Radek Stepanek over two days in the first round. “I managed to win the match. That’s what I’m here to do, but I don’t want to play five sets every round and don’t want to have big drop-offs in matches.

“It’s been a pretty stressful couple of days.”

With 10 hard-fought sets under his belt already, Murray may look forward to a respite from the typical clay-court grind when he faces big-serving Croat Ivo Karlovic on Friday.

“Tomorrow I will be tired, but at least I get a day’s rest now. But you can’t continue playing matches like that and then expect to win the tournament,” Murray, who leads 6-0 in the FedEx ATP Head2Head rivalry against Karlovic, said. “I think maybe once I have started a Grand Slam playing two five-set matches in the first couple of rounds.

“The positive is that I’ll play Karlovic in the next round. The average rally length will only be a few shots. Maybe three, four shots max. So if I can get through the next one, it will be nice to win it a bit quicker.”

As he prepares for a seventh meeting with the towering Croat, Murray might be happy to know that Karlovic himself is coming off an epic five-setter. On Thursday, the World No. 28 needed to hit 41 aces to edge Jordan Thompson 12-10 in the decider.