Over the past week at the Australian Open in Melbourne Sir Andy Murray has often seemed more like a medieval knight than a tennis player, undergoing the kinds of physical trials and feats of endurance that were the stuff of chivalric romances. He’s even carried a war wound from previous campaigns, a metal plate that supports a damaged hip. But in the end, despite a heroic effort on Saturday, he couldn’t quite slay the dragon – or at least his third-round opponent, Roberto Bautista Agut.
To have done so, he would have had to rewrite not just courtly literature but the record books. No one had ever played more than nine hours in the first two matches of a tennis tournament and gone on to win their third match. Murray played for a combined 10 hours and 34 minutes to beat Matteo Berrettini and Thanasi Kokkinakis in two epic five-setters.
