Players Under the Microscope / Ralph Ellis / 15 April 2010 /

Andy Murray crashed out of the Monte Carlo Masters yesterday in the first round, his game loaded with unforced errors and lapses of concentration. Ralph Ellis worries about his prospects for the rest of the season...

I don't want to make excuses, but if this is not the best column I ever wrote, it's been one of those mornings. The alarm didn't go off on time, then my breakfast toast got burned, and the postman arrived with a package to sign for just as I was settling down to write. As I say, no excuses, but . . .

We've all heard sportsmen go through those routines. The pitch was too wet, or dry, the photographer clicked on the backswing, the wind was swirling, etc, etc. So actually I'm quite happy this morning to read Andy Murray's assessment of why he went out of the Monte Carlo Open at the first attempt. "I was just rubbish. I played a rubbish match and that was all there was to it."

The gossip was that Murray and his Mum Judy were so unhappy at the service in a Japanese restaurant on Monday night that they queried the bill and refused to leave a tip. Murray's first service was even worse, with only 37% of them landing in court.
You sense that Britain's great tennis hope is at a bit of a crossroads after the disappointment of going so close to his first Grand Slam title in Melbourne at the start of the year. After arriving at the Australian Open having clearly given a lot of thought to his career - he'd streamlined his coaching team, done his usual tough pre-season training spell in Miami, and ditched his girlfriend Kim Sears - he ended up so near yet so far, well beaten by Roger Federer in the final. His response was to get away from the game completely for a week or two, and he's struggled ever since.

Murray's honest assessment of what went wrong against German Philipp Kohlschreiber in a 6-1 6-2 defeat is actually quite encouraging. It means he'll address the problems of why he was so poor, rather than blame anything or anybody else.

What he needs now is to get back the sort of obsession to be at his best week in and week out that marked his rise up the rankings. That didn't happen just because he did well at the big tournaments, it happened because he was performing just as consistently at the Timbuktoo Masters as he was when he got to Roland Garros or Wimbledon.
There's a feeling that Murray might have got ahead of himself by trying to focus purely on the big tournaments. That's fine if you're Roger Federer. But even Rafael Nadal takes his A game to every other venue, as he proved yesterday by crushing Dutchman Thimo de Bakker in under an hour.

I said back in January that I feared Murray's chance of becoming world number one might already have come and gone. This morning he's not even in the top four any longer after losing in opening matches of successive tournaments for the first time since 2006. In Betfair's Specials market it's [1.51] that he won't reach the top two at any time this year, and between [1.35] and [1.65] that his wait for a first Grand Slam will go on into 2011. As for Wimbledon, he's [7.2] and rising, and he certainly won't be allowed any excuses there.

Five things you might not know about Philipp Kohlschreiber

Born October 1983 in the Bavarian town of Augsburg, his full names are Philipp Eberhard Hermann. His dad Gerhard ran a petrol filling station

Mum Maria, a kindergarten teacher, was a keen member of the local tennis club and Philipp started playing aged four

He's rated by many to hit the best single-handed backhand on the tour, and says it's the one shot that just came naturally to him without ever being coached

His fitness trainer Marco Panicci also works with Slovakia's female star Daniela Hantuchova. Swedish coach Stefan Eriksson's claim to fame was being on the wrong end of a 6-0, 6-0, 6-0 hammering by Stefan Edberg in 1987 that was the first whitewash of the Open era

He's a Bayern Munich fan and gets to as many of their games as he can despite now living in Switzerland

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