Andy Murray secured the 40th title of his career and his fifth of the year when he defeated Grigor Dimitrov 6-4, 7-6(2) in the Beijing Open final on Sunday evening. Murray failed to serve out the match late in the second set, but he righted the ship to dominate the ensuing tiebreaker and thus finished the job in one hour and 57 minutes.
“It was probably my best match of the week,” the second-ranked Scot commented. “But my second serve tonight was probably the best part of my game. A lot of the unreturned serves came off second serves. Considering the conditions were fairly cold, I was still serving over a hundred miles an hour on some second serves. I felt using good variation on that shot, so I didn’t give him a chance to really attack me there and that was probably the thing that I did best tonight.”
“Andy’s pretty much the greatest player this year,” Dimitrov praised. “He’s been winning a lot and has a lot of confidence. He obviously knows how to move well on the court. All the credit to him. I personally think I didn’t play a good enough match to rally with him throughout. Maybe the second set was a little bit better.”
With his 500 points from Beijing, Murray is now just 1,555 points south of top-ranked Novak Djokovic in the 2016 race. There are still two Masters 1000s events remaining on the schedule–this upcoming week in Shanghai and later this month in Paris.
Both Nick Kyrgios and David Goffin have distant hopes for World Tour Finals qualification and they faced each other in the Japan Open final on Sunday. Goffin stormed out of the gates on fire, but it was Kyrgios who ended up capturing his third title of the season (and third of his career) via a 4-6, 6-3, 7-5 decision.
“It was tough; we had a lot of long rallies,” Kyrgios noted. “I thought the way I returned today got me a lot of opportunities. It was a high-quality match but I got lucky at times, as well. I played a very tough match against Gael Monfils yesterday, so it took me a little time to get into this match. David makes you feel like the court is very small. My serve got me out of trouble today.
“I enjoyed playing in front of the great crowd here. They’re very enthusiastic and very respectful. I have always loved playing in Japan.”
Thanks to his triumph in Tokyo, the 21-year-old climbed two places to 12th in the race to London. He is 50 points back of Goffin for No. 11 and 780 points behind Dominic Thiem for the all-important eighth spot.
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