After five runner-up completions at the Australian Open, world number one Andy Murray is adopting an alternate strategy to the season-opening excellent hammer at Melbourne Park one month from now.
The Briton is planning for the Jan. 16-29 competition by contending in the Mubadala World Tennis Championship in Abu Dhabi as opposed to the blended group round robin arrangement of the Hopman Cup in Perth which he has favored throughout the previous two years.
Murray plays his first match on Friday and was his typical mindfully idealistic self when gotten some information about at last consummation his Melbourne dry season.
“I’ve played really well there in the past and it hasn’t happened for me so I’ll need to do something a little bit different this year,” Murray told Reuters on Wednesday.
“I love the conditions there and I enjoy the tournament a lot, and I’ll be going in hopefully playing well and with a lot of confidence because of the way I finished 2016, so I’ll give it a good go this year.”
The 29-year-old twofold Olympic champion will go to Melbourne with his certainty out of this world subsequent to thumping Novak Djokovic, the man who has beaten him in four Australian Open finals, off the highest point of the world rankings.
The Scot won nine titles in 2016, including Wimbledon and the Olympic gold award, and whipped Djokovic in the last of the ATP Tour Finals to take beat spot in the rankings from the Serb.
Nonetheless, the 24-coordinate winning run that helped him arrive his last five competitions of the season incurred significant damage.
“Getting to number one it took me basically the whole year, right down to the last tournament, the last match of the year to finish number one, so that was really, really hard and it took a lot out of me physically and mentally,” Murray said.
“I was really, really tired, more tired than I’ve been at the end of any season that I’d finished before.”
Murray has a bye into Friday’s semi-finals in the UAE and will confront the victor of Thursday’s quarter-last between David Goffin of Belgium and France’s Jo-Wilfried Tsonga.
