Andy Murray mouthed an ominous message in his demoralising Qatar Open defeat to teenager Jakub Mensik on Wednesday. The 36-year-old’s trip to the Middle East got off to the perfect start, beating Alexandre Muller to notch his first victory since October, but the relief wasn’t to last long.
Things were looking up for Murray when he powered past Muller in straight sets on Tuesday. But he followed that up with a loss to 18-year-old Mensik, who won two out of three tiebreaks to book his spot in the quarter-finals.
Murray was chasing the game by the time he earned a break point at 5-5 in the second set. But when the veteran miscued his shot into the net, his reaction was telling, as he clearly mouthed: “This game is not for me anymore. It’s not for me anymore, this game.”
Although Murray recovered to take the second-set tiebreak, he eventually crashed out 6-7 7-6 6-7 against the lowly 116th-ranked youngster.
Asked if there were any positives to take from his run to the Qatar Open last 16, Murray said: “Yeah, I think probably in the matches that I played this year, like the one against Grigor [Dimitrov] in Brisbane, sort of felt like I kind of played it the right way.
“I really didn’t feel like I played a good match at the Australian Open. Then, yeah, I think the last two days there was some positive stuff. I was hitting the ball a bit harder, I was trying to come forward to the net and, you know, I wasn’t the one getting pushed around all the time.”
Murray, who boasts three Grand Slam titles on his CV, has chopped and changed between hinting at retirement and insisting he wants to play on in recent months. Defeat to Tomas Martin Etcheverry at January’s Australian Open saw him admit there was a ‘definite possibility’ he may never play competitively in Melbourne again.
Leading up to the Qatar Open, however, the Glasgow-born veteran insisted he is not ready to walk away, stating: “I want to keep playing just now, so I’m not going to stop.”
Murray had been on a torrid run before defeating Muller in Qatar. Since the Swiss Indoors last October, he suffered consecutive first-round defeats at the Paris Masters, the Brisbane International, the Australian Open, the Open Sud de France and the Open 13.
Hip surgeries in 2018 and 2019 have hampered Murray’s movement on the court and he has not made it beyond the third round of a Grand Slam since fighting back to fitness.
