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Andy Murray Indian Wells 2021

Andy Murray: ‘I am extremely disappointed, but positive about next season’


Andy Murray has admitted he has been ‘downbeat’ about the way his season, ended, although he remains determined to rebuild his career.

Murray is attempting to regain something close to his previous level after his career-altering hip injury in 2017.

The injury cost Murray more than two years of his career before resurfacing surgery allowed him to resume, and it has been a long and difficult climb back up through the rankings since then.

He had hoped to finish the season strongly to get himself in among the seeds for the Australian Open, but cramping problems put paid to that. He, though, is not ready to give up. Far from it.

“I was pretty downbeat with the last few months,” Murray said. “The last seven or eight tournaments, I had issues with cramping and I’ve never had that consistently. So, I’m extremely disappointed.

“I can deal with losing a tennis match as it’s a difficult sport and you sometimes don’t perform as well as you’d like but there’s no excuse for being let down physically.

“My reflection on the last four or five months is that I’ve not been doing enough work to perform at the level I need to. I need to change that if I want to get back to the top of the game.”

Despite the disappointment, Andy Murray has had a progressive season, even if it hasn’t been as quick as he’d hoped.

“I’m positive about next season and the work I have to do,” he said. “I’ve already started some of that and I need to empty the tank in the next six to eight weeks in the gym and on the practice court.

“I was 130-140 in the world at the start of the season and I’m now inside the top 50. For most players, that’s a really positive year. For me, I don’t view it that way but I did make progress.

“There’s no guarantee I would have won those matches without the cramping but I feel there would have been potentially deeper runs.

“I played quite a lot of tournaments from Wimbledon through to the end of the season. From an endurance perspective, I didn’t cope that well but there’s not been the injuries and niggles, which hasn’t been the case the last few years.”

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Michael Graham, Tennishead.net Editor, has been a professional sports journalist for his whole career and is especially passionate about tennis. He's been the Editor of Tennishead.net for over 5 years and loves watching live tennis by visiting as many tournaments as possible. Michael specialises in writing in-depth features about the ATP & WTA tours.