Yet another encounter without much history: Andy's played - & beaten - Troicki once before in his career, last year in the first round at St Petersburg (4 & 4) on his way to the title... Should at least repeat that feat, provided he raises his game. He certainly can't afford a repeat of the slackness he showed against Massú today, methinks!
I don't (stars, asterisks, ampersands and hash-marks) believe it!
I missed Saturday's match because the Chorus I'm in was giving a performance. I missed tonight's match because Monday is rehearsal evening. At least I'll see him on Wednesday, I thought.
But no - he is playing tomorrow, second match on Grandstand with the first starting 11am (4pm here) and tomorrow night is church choir practice for Easter!! I might see the start, but not the end
Murray should win.... but he'll have to raise his level of play from what he showed against Massu.
Troicki has had a couple of decent wins here, but the Nalbandian match was more to do with Numpty fancing a week on the beach, while you'd expect him to beat Phau easily anyway, so it's hard to judge the form he's in.
Troicki will try and attack Murray, which will be a different type of match to the Massu/Monaco one's, and hopefully that will engage Murray a bit more, and he should come through this, but the way he's played he might need a third set.
That was all very disappointing. I was expecting Andy to win, assuming he was playing well, but I did think Troicki was going to him he a tougher match than that. I think it just came down to his first serves, 25% in the first set and 43% in the second. If you constantly miss your serve, you're bound to get despondent. Troicki didn't do too badly when he did manage to get a serve in. Still, getting to the forth round is a good run for him. I guess he was just having a bad day.
Can Andy go further in this tournament than Novak and close the points gap a little further.
Again, we can't really tell how well Murray was playing if Troicki was as bad as it sounds like he was, but it's still a good win for Murray, and only dropping one game to a top 40 player is never a bad result.
Now *that's* a nice scoreline to come home to!
