TENNIS Mutua Madrid Open 2014 – An interview with Andy Murray.
Q. Could you give us a sense of what you’ve been up to in the last couple weeks and how practicing has been going in Valencia and the conditions here.
ANDY MURRAY: Yeah, I took like 10 days off after Davis Cup and then, yeah, I practiced a bit on the clay courts at Wimbledon. Practiced with quite a few of the doubles guys: Ross and Colin; practiced with my brother and Jamie Delgado and John Peers a little bit. Just did some drilling there and worked on sliding and the movement a little bit.
Then, yeah, headed over to Valencia to start practicing. I practiced with Andujar, Battista, Ferrer a little bit. Donskoy. So some good guys to practice with there in perfect conditions.
Q. You feel confident to come back to the Top 4 in short future and to compete with Nadal and Wawrinka once again?
ANDY MURRAY: Well, the most important thing is that I show it on the court and at the major events. That’s what I train for.
So, yeah, I mean, we’ll obviously to have wait and see what happens over the next sort of six or seven months.
Yeah, that’s it. We’ll have to wait and see.
Q. Can you tell us something about maybe future prospective coaches you’ve considered?
ANDY MURRAY: No. I don’t want to go into any names because that would cause me a lot of stress over the next week or so. A lot of questions. So I won’t go into that.
But it’s something I did start to think about a lot the last couple of weeks. Hopefully getting closer to making a decision in the next month or so.
Neil, other thing, I went to Paris for a couple days and practiced at Roland Garros with Tsonga. Forgot about that. Spent a couple days in Paris as well.
Q. Just like to ask, do you think the game is getting more and more physical and that’s why there are more injuries, or is it the schedule that’s getting tougher and tougher?
ANDY MURRAY: I think the hard courts make a difference to that. I love hard courts. Probably my best surface. But we do play a lot of the tournaments on the hard courts.
The whole of the sort of winter stretch when we play over in Asia and back to Europe at the end of a long year, that’s tough on the hard courts.
And then the whole buildup to the US Open is also hard courts.
From the Australian Open, for me any way, from the Australian Open through really until Monte Carlo is, again, all hard courts. I think it’s a challenging surface for the joints.
For me, not so much my muscles, but when I finish playing hard courts the joints hurt: hips, knees, back.
Yeah, you’ve seen a lot more surgeries. A lot of guys that have finished playing later in life have had quite a lot of issues with knees and hips and stuff.
I think it’s probably something to do with the hard courts.
