No. 1 Nadal holds on to beat Murray at ATP finals

No. 1 Nadal holds on to beat Murray at ATP finals
CHRIS LEHOURITES,AP Sports Writer Chris Lehourites


LONDON (AP) — After relentlessly running each other all over the court for more than three hours in a match that flip-flopped throughout, Rafael Nadal got the breaks he needed Friday to beat Andy Murray 7-6 (5), 3-6, 7-6 (6).

The top-ranked Spaniard, who won this year’s U.S. Open to complete a career Grand Slam, had to overcome a mid-match slump to reach the final of the ATP World Tour Finals for the first time.

“Today I played one of the best matches of my career,” said Nadal, who has never won the season-ending event for the top eight players in the world.

The French Open, Wimbledon and U.S. Open champion will face Roger Federer or Novak Djokovic in Sunday’s final at the O2 Arena.

Both players looked unbeatable throughout the first set, which Nadal won in a tiebreaker despite a late surge from Murray. But Nadal started to falter after holding serve to lead 3-2 in the second. Murray won 17 of the next 23 points — and four straight games — to take the set and even the score.

Nadal never looked as good after the mid-match slump, but he managed to break Murray to take a 2-1 lead in the third set. The Spaniard then had his first match point on Murray’s serve while leading 5-3, but the fifth-ranked Briton managed to hold the game, break back to 5-5 and force the final tiebreaker.

“I probably played one bad game the whole match, or maybe just a couple of bad points,” Murray said. “But, yeah, it was great tennis. I think both of us played well pretty much from the beginning of the match.”

In the tiebreaker, Murray won the first three points — two of them on Nadal’s serve — and looked like he was going to roll to victory. But Nadal clawed back to 4-4 before getting another match point at 6-5.

Murray again saved that one, but he couldn’t do anything about the final match point, which Nadal won with an inside-out forehand.

Murray finished with 22 aces but he also had 47 unforced errors to go along with his 53 winners. Overall, the Briton won 114 points in the match, five more than Nadal.

“It was one of those matches where you kind of knew — so many long rallies, so many good points — I kind of knew when I was out there that it was a great match,” Murray said. “It’s nice in some ways to be involved in matches like that. But it’s not nice losing them.”

In the first set, Nadal and Murray traded forehands and backhands but neither allowed the other even one break point.

The second set started much the same, although Nadal did waste the first two break points of the match in the second game. Murray then broke serve to lead 4-3, and then broke again to take the set.

“I played a great match today,” Murray said. “Whether it’s the best match I played and lost, I don’t know. But it was a great match.”

In doubles, Daniel Nestor of Canada and Nenad Zimonjic of Serbia beat top-ranked Bob and Mike Bryan of the United States 6-3, 3-6, 12-10. In the late match, Mariusz Fyrstenberg and Marcin Matkowski of Poland were to play Mahesh Bhupathi of India and Max Mirnyi of Belarus.