Andy Murray was at his very best as he thrashed and out-of-sorts Tomas Berdych 6-1, 6-3 in the quarter finals of the Shanghai Masters to set up a semi final clash with world number one Novak Djokovic.
Berdych, who is experiencing a dip in form in this final stretch of the season, hit a whopping 30 unforced errors and, most importantly, only made 55% of his first serves, which is far too much of a handicap to give away against someone of Murray’s calibre on return.
The Scot managed to put together nine successive games when he went 3-0 up in the second set and on the day it looked like there was much more of a gap in the rankings between the two than only three places.
Berdych was always playing catch up and every point he won came as the result of a lot of hard work, although the end of match stats showed that Murray ran twice the amount that Berdych did in the match. The match was pretty much a foregone conclusion from the moment the world number two broke in the third game of the first set and for the Czech it was once again a lost chance to book his tickets for the World Tour Finals.
Murray will now face Djokovic as he will attempt to break the Serb’s fifteen-match winning streak by playing the same kind of tennis that helped him overcome the world number one in the Montreal Masters final in August.
