Murray Topples Ferrer for Miami Masters Title
Steen Kirby, TennisEastCoast.com
Andy Murray did one win better than last year in Miami, toppling David Ferrer 2-6 6-4 7-6 to win his 9th Masters 1000 and 2nd ATP Miami title in a grueling final. He also moves to number 2 in the ATP rankings.
Murray got whitewashed by Ferrer in the opening set, failing to compete at all for the first 4 games of the match,and then double faulting a couple of games later to give Ferrer the set. He woke up in the 2nd, breaking early and competing with Ferrer at an equal to superior level and eventually doing enough to take it.
In the 3rd they went back and forth, trading breaks as both were poor on serve and then Murray failed to serve the match out. He later gave Ferrer a championship point at 5-6 but Ferrer stopped to challenge the line call, lost the challenge, and thus lost the point with Murray holding to force a final tiebreak. In the tiebreak, Murray got ahead early and Ferrer basically fell apart with Murray winning a nail biter of a final set to take the title. Though the quality of the match itself was not that great, there were a few excellent rallies and the error counts kept mounting for both players as they trudged along in the heat and humidity of daytime Miami.
The Miami event was characterized by upsets and attrition in general this year as Murray beat Bernard Tomic, Grigor Dimitrov, Andreas Seppi, Marin Cilic and Richard Gasquet to reach the final, only dropping a set to Gasquet. Murray was a bit of a slow starter in all his matches. Ferrer, who will be 31 this week, got a 2nd round walkover then beat Fabio Fognini, Kei Nishikori, Jurgen Melzer and Tommy Haas. The latter couple of matches both went 3 sets and Melzer and Haas, a couple of crafty veterans who made surprise runs this week, competed with Ferrer strongly before eventually wearing down.
Tommy Haas, at 34, has to be the feel good story of the week as he beat Igor Sijsling and Alex Dolgopolov then utterly shocked Novak Djokovic in an easy, dominant, straight sets and followed it up by a crushing victory over Gilles Simon to make the semis. Haas may well be a top 10 player by the end of the clay court season.
Semifinalist Gasquet beat Nicolas Almagro and Tomas Berdych in consecutive rounds to reach the semis and in one other big upset this week, German Tobias Kamke beat a listless and slow Juan Martin Del Potro in the 2nd round.
In the doubles, Aisam-Ul-Haq Qureshi and Jean-Julien Rojer beat Mariusz Fyrstenberg and Marcin Matkowski.
On one other note of interest, Miami also had a bit of questionable umpiring in matches between John Isner and Ivan Dodig and Melzer and Kamke.
The Melzer-Kamke time violation video is below. As for the match between Isner and Dodig, deep in the 3rd set of a competitive match, Dodig hit a serve that Isner did not return. Dodig challenged and the ball was ruled in, but instead of awarding him the point, he was forced to replay the point. Dodig failed to serve the match out and got frustrated, with Isner eventually winning the match in a 3rd set tiebreak.
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Return Serve?