After the Australian Open tennis fans and media were more interested in the state of mind and the coaching status of Scot Andy Murray but after his three hour loss to Rafael Nadal in yesterday’s Monte Carlo semi final everyone is now more interested in his elbow.
The Scot delayed proceedings for extra warm up time after having an injection to settle some pain that he had started feeling in his previous match. After the loss the world number four spoke to media about his elbow.
“It’s been a tough day for me. I didn’t know up until 5 past 3:00 whether I was going to play or not. I had a cortisone injection, whatever, local anesthetic in my elbow before the match.
I never had any problems with my elbow before. Yesterday, the beginnin
g of the second set, I felt something. Managed to play through it. It was sort of on the inside. Then this morning, was hitting, warming up fine. Went to hit some serves; I couldn’t serve.
So I’m happy that I gave it my best, but I think I can do better. Yeah, it was disappointing because I felt like I was playing well. So have to see how it feels tomorrow and what I do from here.
I mean, certainly I’ll have an MRI scan maybe tomorrow. You sometimes get like a bit of bone basically that sort of has fallen off. It sounds worse than it is, but it’s basically floating around in the joint. So it was getting a lot of, like, every time I bend it, I get of a lot of like clicking.
Right now it’s not really clicking, it just feels really bruised because I obviously had a couple of injections. There’s blood and stuff going in there.
But it’s happened the other way where I played Rafa a few times where he struggled at the end, has had some problems. You always want to try and finish the match.”
Hopefully he doesn’t have a boney fragment floating around in there as they are notoriously difficult in elbows if they don’t quickly reabsorb… Just ask Justine Henin. Henin’s injury was different but I would certainly not expect Andy to play in next weeks Barcelona tournament if there is such a problem.
