Andy Murray’s five-year sequence of grand-slam consistency was threatened here by Adrian Mannarino, the unheralded Frenchman who has only ever beaten one top-ten player in his career.
• Konta beats Muguruza in longest ever women’s match at US Open
Murray fell two sets behind after an hour and three-quarters of a match that found him strangely sluggish and short of positive intent. The biggest problem seemed to be a lack of fluency on his forehand side, which leaked so many errors in the opening exchanges that he was reduced to rolling it into the court for the rest of the match without any aggressive intent.
But if it is a difficult thing to win two sets against Murray, then the real challenge is to win the third. Seven times before in his career, he had mounted successful comebacks from two sets down. And when he broke early in the third set, you had to suspect that this might be the eighth.
Mannarino is a real oddball, a Frenchman who weighs barely 11st and stands less than six foot tall, but who has the sort of magic hands that can deliver winners from unpredictable angles. Judging by his deft drop shots, he missed his vocation as a surgeon.
• Jack Sock carried off court after collapsing at US Open
On a swelteringly humid day in New York, Murray found himself on the back foot from the very first point, as Mannarino slammed a service return straight back past him to make it very clear that he was not intimidated.
He has a hint of cockiness about him which served him well in the giant auditorium of Arthur Ashe Stadium, the biggest court in world tennis. Mannarino went on to break serve in that first game, as Murray absorbed a heap of punishment on the slow second serves that Nick Kyrgios had also targeted in his first-round match on Tuesday. His opponent’s unpredictability was as much of a problem as his sublime ball-striking.
Despite what Andy Roddick describes as “one of the highest tennis IQs in the game,” Murray couldn’t seem to read Mannarino’s intentions.
The loss of the first set might have seemed a minor detail but the second was a serious business. Suddenly Murray was back in the territory that Feliciano Lopez (twice) and Robin Haase have both put him at this tournament before, struggling his way through an early-round match that had appeared straightforward enough on paper.
There were a couple of flashpoints in that set, one as Mannarino responded to an angled drop-volley by walloping a full-strength backhand straight into Murray’s back, and another when the Frenchman hit a loose ball in frustration after an unforced error. It flew narrowly past his opponent before cannoning into a courtside cameraman, and Murray made a strong case to umpire Carlos Bernardes to say that Mannarino should be warned for ball abuse.
The watching ESPN pundit Darren Cahill, who was sitting just behind Bernardes, suggested on TV that Murray had been seriously annoyed by the latter incident, and took a while to let it go. His concentration was apparently affected as he failed to arrest his slide to a 7-5, 6-4 deficit.
Inevitably, his mood darkened, with a few sweary instructions to his player’s box to “shut the —- up”. But he also knew that Mannarino’s flat-hitting game, which revolves around taking the ball early and going for the lines, was a sort of fairweather tennis. If he could make this into a rugged battle, Mannarino was unlikely to be able to maintain his poise.
So it came to pass as the errors mounted for Mannarino in a disappointing third set. A man who had been fending off break points with nose-thumbing insouciance suddenly started shipping water. The momentum reversed, and after both players had left the court after the third set for a bathroom break, it was Murray who came back looking the more refreshed.
In the end, he broke his opponent’s will and left him physically drained, rather as Johanna Konta had done with the more highly-rated Garbine Muguruza on Court 17 earlier in the day. The final match time was 3hrs 17mins, just six minutes shorter than Konta’s epic. But while Murray can be thankful to have made it through this unexpected road-block, he will also have burned more energy at this stage of the tournament than any of his leading rivals.
“It was extremely tough,” said Murray. “He hits the ball extremely flat with a very short backswing that makes it hard to read where the ball is going. I was leaving the ball short a lot early in the match and me made me do a lot of running.”
Yet another left-hander, 30th seed Thomaz Bellucci, lies in wait for Murray in the third round.
Meanwhile the third Briton on show, Aljaz Bedene, went out of the tournament in four sets to Donald Young.
After making a strong start, Bedene was gradually worn down by the greater creativity of his opponent, a left-hander like Mannarino who plays with almost as much guile.
