Sport

Murray no match for offal-y impressive Djokovic

Novak Djokovic, right, Serbia talks with Andy Murray  after winning the men's singles final at the Australian Open 
Novak Djokovic, right, Serbia talks with Andy Murray  after winning the men's singles final at the Australian Open  Novak Djokovic, right, Serbia talks with Andy Murray  after winning the men's singles final at the Australian Open 

IN the end, the place was like a maternity ward. Andy was crying. Boris was crying. Judy was crying.

Novak Djokovic’s firmware hasn’t been updated yet to facilitate any display of emotion or physical weakness, but his were the only dry eyes in the house.

“I feel like I’ve been here before,” said Andy Murray after yet another Australian Open final defeat to his Serb nemesis.

“Kim,” he said, addressing his wife back home who is expecting their first child any day, “you’ve been a legend for the last two weeks – I’ll be on the first flight home.”

You can hardly blame the Scot for shedding a few tears.

You’d be crying too if everything you threw at T-1000 across the net not only came back, but more often than not blazed past your eyes, catching a tiny sliver of white line thin enough to tickle Diego Maradona’s nostrils.

The Serb is a machine. That forehand. That backhand. Djokovic could return a used pair of undies the day after Christmas with no receipt, and there’d be no questions asked.

When these two have met at the Australian Open in previous years, you could comfortably have set the alarm for 8am, got up and watched a bit of the action, gone back to bed for an hour, then got up again to find them playing the same point as when you drifted off.

But Djokovic wasn’t in the mood for hanging about yesterday, rattling off the first set before Murray could say ‘Hawkeye the noo’.

By this stage Murray was gesticulating, swearing at the floor and puffing like a 50-year-old on the final stretch of an ultra-marathon through the Highlands.

Djokovic, by contrast, exuded the leisurely calm of a man who’d just popped out to the shops for 20 Regal and a pint of milk.

But buoyed by the support of his fans in the Rod Laver Arena – none moreso that Simon Reel and Frew McMillan (no, me either) in the Europort commentary box – Murray hit the comeback trail.

Stopping just short of invoking Mel Gibson’s famous speech before the Battle of Stirling Bridge, South African Frew was willing the Scot to get back into the game.

“He trusted in his phenomenal talent and it paid off. He’s still alive here,” he said as Murray won a point against the Djokovic serve – but it wasn’t enough to stop the Serb express train cantering to a straight sets win. 

It wasn’t the way Frew thought it would have gone before the first ball had been tossed in anger, as he delivered the kind of sheep organs-infused analysis anybody who has ever lifted a microphone can only dream of.

“My thought was he could win comfortably if it was a quick win, but if it went to a long match, Murray’s hunger for one bite of haggis here, as it were, might have been his goal.

“The thought was that he might have tried his heart out and Djokovic might have said ‘oh well I’ve had enough... whatever it is in Serbia that they eat – I think it’s cevapi or sarma – I’m not going to try that hard’, but it wasn’t to be...”

Haggis? Heart? Cevapi? Frew cannot be serious.