Andy Murray Makes Hard Work of it in Miami

Well, that was far from straight forward, wasn’t it?

In a match which many thought would represent a relatively easy passage to the third round, Andy Murray gave us quite the scare before rediscovering his touch to beat Juan Monaco 4-6, 6-3, 6-2. In the process he sealed his place in the third round of the Sony Ericsson Open.

Make no mistake about it, this wasn’t the vintage Murray performance that we’ve become accustomed to. There were actually times where he seemed in real danger against the Argentinean. Fortunately, though, the usual swagger of his performance was missing, there was no shortage of character from the young man.

In fairness to Monaco, he’s no slouch on the tennis courts. The Argentine currently sits at 59th place in the rankings, and only last year was as high as 14^th on the tour—his highest position to date.

And his quality showed, as he comprehensively outplayed an out of sorts Murray in the first set, breaking him in the third game as the Scot struggled to get going.

However, as the match wore on, Murray’s superiority began to tell. He secured a break in the fourth game of the second set, and, in the deciding game of the set, broke the World No. 59 again to level the match.

The force was with Murray at this point, and after raising his game at first, Monaco just couldn’t maintain his level of performance for the whole match. The next set was duly wrapped up by Murray, and he closed out the match comfortably.

Indeed, there’s no doubting Murray made harder work of this match than he should have—in the first set at least. The old Murray might have wilted under such pressure.

But he’s now made of sterner stuff and he deserves credit for coming back into the match, with the Scotsman showing his fighting qualities in the second and third sets.

It was never truly comfortable, however, with Monaco showing stiff resistance throughout. Murray will certainly need to play much better if he is to go far in this tournament and close in on Novak Djokovic’s No. 3 ranking.

On the upside, today’s results have been quite kind to Murray, who has been spared the unenviable prospect of possibly facing David Nalbandian in the fourth round, after the Argentine crashed out at the expense of Viktor Troicki of Serbia, losing 6-1, 6-3.

The powerful Mardy Fish was also eliminated, going down to Nicolas Massú of Chile. And it’s the gutsy Massú next up for Murray.

He won’t be short of match sharpness, that’s for sure.