Pre-match, Milos Raonic was asked what he thought would be his biggest challenge against Andy Murray in the final.
“Andy tries to get you doing a lot of different things,” Raonic had replied. “He’ll try to throw you off, give you some slower balls, some harder balls, all these different kinds of things. I guess my goal is to keep him away from that.”
To sum it up, Raonic said he had to avoid getting “sucked into [playing] Murray’s game”.
Unfortunately for the Canadian, that is just how it happened. Raonic, playing his first grand slam final, tried his best not to get sucked in. But a merciless Murray, one of the best movers in the sport, kept picking him off from the back of the court to clinch his second Wimbledon crown with a routine 6-4, 7-6, 7-6 win.
Like some Pied Piper, Murray had Raonic under his spell and never really looked bothered, not receiving nor serving. His energy was intense, his retrieving breath-taking and his backhand passes were particularly lethal on the day – he kept drilling them past his 6-foot-five opponent with regularity.
Twelve of Murray’s 39 winners in the final were backhand passes, while Raonic could not pass him even once, not with a backhand or forehand, and that should tell you something about his opponent’s defence and positioning.
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The world No 2 was so good, he made even Raonic’s most potent weapon look a bit ordinary. We are talking about the serve, of course. It was always going to be crucial to Raonic’s fortunes in the final, but the 25-year-old player could not get a serve past Murray in the first 36 minutes of the match and that opening half hour decided the momentum of the match.
Raonic did not have an ace in his first four service games, and only one in the first set and eight in the match. Not that he was serving below par. In the ninth game of the second set, he fired in a monstrous 147mph serve – the fastest of the tournament – but Murray, playing someone other than a Novak Djokovic or Roger Federer for the first time in 11 major finals, managed to put it back and then followed-up with a backhand pass.
In the first six matches of the tournament, Raonic was serving an average of seven aces a set. He had fired 137 aces on his way into the final, an average of around 23 every match.
Murray, of course, is in a different league to the opponents Raonic had bludgeoned on his way into the final. The 2013 Wimbledon champion is considered one of the best returners in the game and many pundits have compared him to the legendary Andre Agassi. You just have to look at the tournament stats to understand why.
In the first six matches of this Wimbledon fortnight, Murray had put 77 per cent of returns into play, which is the best for the tournament. He also had the highest percentage of return games won – 36.
Murray’s nagging defence has always bothered Raonic. At least, the results clearly suggest that – this is his sixth consecutive defeat against the Scot. Everything that worked for him against Federer in the semis – the booming serves, volleys, groundstrokes and passing shots – kept coming back in the final.
Against Federer, Raonic had 23 aces and won 83 per cent of the points (94-113) on his first serve. In the final, he could fire only eight aces and had a winning percentage of 67 (49-73) on his first serves. Murray, by contrast, had seven aces and won a staggering 87 per cent (60-69) of his first serve points.
The most important stat, however, could be the distance Murray forced Raonic to cover in the match. Against Federer in the semis, he covered 2,382.8 metres across five sets for an average of 7.3 metres per point. He had to cover a greater distance in three sets of the final – 2,417.3 metres for an average of 11.1 metres per point.
Looking at that final stat, one thing becomes obvious: Raonic got outmanoeuvred by Murray yet again, an irrepressible Murray this time.
Or, to use his own words, he got “sucked in” and that is probably where he lost the match.
arizvi@thenational.ae
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