Murray & Lendl: How much left in this team?

You may remember that I was never very hopeful about the arrival of Lendl in the Murray team. I love Lendl and think he has a great eye for the game and his comments in general have been extremely good since his renewed interest for the game, especially considering he had not watched a tennis match for nearly 2 decades.

As a coach he probably has lots of good tips to provide in tense tennis situations as he went through those himself and I am sure is good at spotting weaknesses in Murray's opponents.

However, my understanding is that by picking Lendl, Murray thought he could learn form Lendl's difficulties in winning his first slam and Ivan's experience would be hugely beneficial to Murray who reached 3 finals and failed to win a set out of the 9 played.

What a mistake if you ask me! No-one is going to win a slam for Andy. He has to find himself a way to win it. regardless the coach he has. That is the key.

I cannot think of male tennis player who won his first slam being coached by a former slam winner. Connors, Borg, McEnroe, Lendl himself, Becker, Edberg, Pete, Agassi, Federer, Nadal, Djoko, you name it, won their first slam cause they believed he had teh weapons to win it. End of.

It is this self belief that will bring a slam and one cannot buy that out of Lendl, or any other slam champion. You are on your own on the court, and I am sure it feels very lonely there in a slam final.

Problem is Murray is putting too much emphasis on the physical side of the game and build himself a super body getting more fragile by the years to compensate for a lack of real shot making skills, despite what his fans want us to believe.

He needs to hit the ball more loosely and relax so that it goes a bit faster, and deeper without "being scared" of making UEs. As said a few times, he is strong mentally and has the tenacity but simply lacks the guts to go for for aggressive shots and actually miss them when he tries to pull key winners under heavy pressure.

I am not writing him off. He can still do it with or without Lendl but I don;t think he will have much more than 4 other chances to win it. Those kind of games will be obsolete soon with the new generation trying to blast through thos defensive players.