By Chris Oddo | @TheFanChild | Saturday March 26, 2022
It’s on to the clay for Andy Murray, after a second-round loss to Daniil Medvedev at the Miami Open. The three-time major champion says he plans to stick around Florida to continue practicing with coach Ivan Lendl, before heading over to Europe to play a long grass-court season.
“I'm going to train the next three or four weeks here on the hard courts and then go home and start practicing on the grass probably two, two-and-a-half weeks before – there is a challenger in Surbiton, which I may play, and then hopefully be busy after that, try and get a lot of tournaments in through the summer.”
Murray’s first mission when he hits the practice court is to start practicing the right way. He told reporters on Saturday that he needs more clarity in his game, and he plans to make it the focus of his work with Lendl.
“I don't feel I have been practicing the right things probably for 18 months or so,” Murray told reporters on Saturday in Miami. “It's difficult to sort of undo that, you know, in the space of a few weeks obviously. Hence one of the reasons why I'm taking a big period of training to try and change some of those things and hopefully get my game into a place where it's more competitive against the top players again.”
It has been a promising start to 2022 for Murray, even if things haven’t always gone his way. In early February he cracked the top-100 for the first time since 2018, after a solid start to the season that saw him reach the final at Sydney, his first ATP final since 2019.
Murray says he hopes to return to a more aggressive mindset, adding that he felt the difference even after a few days of practice with Lendl.
“In the past, I think the way that I have played and I guess the way that I've practiced as well has allowed me to play a little bit more offensive at times and a little bit more pace on my ball,” he said. “But there are some technical things that sort of allowed me to do that, and I have been practicing the opposite of that for a period.
So can we can expect a more proactive version of Murray in the months to come?
"That's kind of obviously what I'm hoping," he said. "We did a few days of practice before coming here. Some of the things that we worked on, even though it was just a few days, I think I made some improvements. I do feel like I played better here than I did at Indian Wells.
“But yeah, it's going to take a lot of work, because like I said, it's been quite a while that I have maybe not been doing the right things on the practice court, and it takes time to maybe change some of those habits.”