Swiss star Stanislas Wawrinka cruised to a 7-5, 6-2 victory at the World Tour Finals over Spaniard David Ferrer, who was eliminated from tennis’ year-end tournament with the loss. Immediately after his tournament, Andy and his brother Jamie fly out to Belgium to attempt to bring the Davis Cup back to Britain for the first time since 1936.
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“I think the level during the first set was extremely good”, Murray said.
“I had some hair in my eye, and I just wanted to get rid of it. That literally took two seconds”. “Was not at the right time to know that”, Nadal said before praising Murray’s ingenuity with the scissors. Should he beat this year’s Roland Garros champion, a rematch with Nadal would be possible in the title match on Sunday. “[It] was good. It’s a good solution, yeah”.
He could not capitalize on three break points in the eighth game, but was gifted the opening set with a Ferrer double fault – one of eight the Spaniard produced.
Should Murray won, he would have been assured of the number two spot at year-end, but that won’t be happening after he was outsmarted by Nadal. But Murray was far from his best, struggling with a low first serve percentage and high error count. He also appeared to tweak a hamstring in the second set. Nadal was hitting the ball well from the back of the court.
The first set was a high-level contest featuring impressive rallies and smart drop shots but in the second Murray’s game fell away as Nadal turned the screw.
Nadal only needed to hold serve from there, but he went one better, claiming another break to close out the suprisingly straightforward victory over a by-now despondent Murray in 93 minutes.
It has taken eleven months but that fact will do nothing to dampen the enthusiasm in Rafael Nadal’s camp after he completed the takedown of Top-5 players in back-to-back matches for the first time in 2015.
He began well, breaking Nadal in the opening game. But since his third round exit at the U.S. Open, things have gotten better. “But in these situations, if I had done very well here, played great the whole week, it would have been easy to get a little bit complacent”.
Though, his hair hasn’t really been much of a problem for him over the years, I mean, he kind of looked like a sheep a few years ago…
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Rafael Nadal eased past Andy Murray and is on the cusp of reaching the semifinals in London.
