Andy Murray is now prepping up for the grasscourt season after losing his semifinal match at the French Open 2014 tournament. Murray lost in straight sets to eight-time Paris champion Rafael Nadal on Friday.
Murray has a lot of ranking points to defend during the grasscourt season, beginning with the Aegon Championships at The Queen’s Club this week and the Wimbledon tournament where he’s the defending champion on both events. Murray ended a 77-year long wait for a British male champion at the All England Club by defeating Novak Djokovic of Serbia in the final a year ago.
A semifinal finish at Roland Garros guarantees a major improvement on Murray’s rankings on Monday. He skipped the Paris event last year due to back problems.
“I never want to say forget about matches like this, but obviously the grass-court season starts in a couple of days and I need to switch my mind to that,” said Murray. “It’s definitely the most time I have spent on court in a two-week span in the last six months since I came back. So in some ways that’s obviously a good thing; that I managed to get through some long matches.
“But there is still a lot of work for me to do on this surface in particular if I ever want to have a chance at winning this tournament. That’s obvious.
“I’m glad I’m back playing to a level that was able to get me through to the last stage of slams,” he said. “I just need that extra few per cent so that I can give myself a chance to try and win them again.
“But the grass will obviously help me. It’s a surface I have always enjoyed playing on. I think it’s been my most successful surface over my career. I’m really looking forward to Wimbledon especially. It’s only two and a half weeks away, so I don’t have too long to wait.”
Murray assessed how he performed in the match against Nadal and admitted that it was a “bad, bad day.”
“You can go out there with all the tactics in the world, but when he’s hitting the ball like that, it’s very difficult to hit the ball where you want to.”
“He was hitting extremely hard, extremely heavy, returning well, and was hitting it well on the run. That’s the toughest match I have played against him. I’ll need to bounce back quickly from it, because I’m not particularly happy with the way I played today.
“Today I was mishitting a lot of balls. It was incredibly frustrating. I wanted to play better and better as the match went on. In some ways you start trying too hard, and it doesn’t always appear that way. But you want to do stuff too badly, and you end up making more mistakes and things get worse.”
