After six weeks out with left wrist trouble and having slipped to No.4 in the world rankings, Murray is itching to get back to action and takes on the Spanish wildcard Daniel Gimeno-Traver, world ranked No.77.
Having won seven of his 13 ATP Tour titles indoors, Murray will be tipped to win his sixth title of 2009 but, against a relatively strong field which includes Nikolay Davydenko, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Fernando Verdasco and Gael Monfils, the Scot is playing down talk of another victory.
“My wrist is fine [but] I don’t have that many expectations for the next couple of weeks,” Murray said. “I’ve played two matches in about eight weeks or something since the US Open so I will just try, I guess, to ease my way in. Normally it takes a bit of time to get back into playing your best but I feel good.”
Murray first felt the wrist problem before the US Open in August, where he suffered a surprise defeat by Marin Cilic of Croatia in the fourth round.
In late September, he played through the pain in a bid to save Britain from relegation to the third tier of Davis Cup although his two singles wins were not enough to prevent a 3-2 defeat by Poland.
He aggravated the injury with that effort and was forced to withdraw from events in Tokyo and Shanghai which cost him crucial ranking points and dropped him behind Novak Djokovic in the pecking order.
The rest appears to have done him good, though, and Murray looked fit and strong in practice, although he said he had to monitor the wrist as he eases himself back into action.
“I’ve got to ice it and have massage on the forearm,” he said. “I just kind of do strengthening exercises for it, using a powerball and some elastics, exercises like that.”
Gimeno-Traver owes his world ranking to his efforts on clay, for he has played just three hard-court matches – he lost them all – at ATP Tour level and has never played a single ATP Tour match indoors.
Compared to Murray, whose indoor record is 66 wins to 16 losses, Gimeno-Traver would appear to be out of his depth but he did beat Murray, albeit on clay and back in 2005, in their only previous meeting and the Scot said he would not be taking anything for granted.
“I know him a bit from the juniors; he is a good player, solid,” Murray said. “He’s a couple of years older than me and has come through a bit later but it’ll be a tough match. I think he’s been playing well the last month in a lot of Challengers so I’ll have to see how it goes.”
n Linlithgow’s Colin Fleming climbed to a career-high doubles ranking of No.53 yesterday after his victory with Ken Skupski (who climbed to No.50) in the final of the ATP event in St Petersburg.
n Glasgow’s Jamie Baker suffered a surprise 7-6 (7-4), 1-6, 6-3 defeat by the American Jarmere Jenkins in the qualifying event for the USTA Challenger event in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Baker, who has risen to 346 in the world, was the top seed in qualifying after impressing on his comeback tour of Thailand and Australia last month.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article