The feud between Andy Murray and Stefanos Tsitsipas doesn’t appear to be cooling down any time soon after the duo’s dramatic first-round clash at the 2021 U.S. Open on Monday evening.
Murray, a three-time Grand Slam winner including a U.S. Open championship in 2012, put together one of his strongest performances in years as the current No. 118 ranked tennis player pushed Tsitsipas — the No. 3 seed and one of the favorites to win it all in Queens this year — to five sets, though he would ultimately lose 6-2, 6-7 (7-9), 6-3, 3-6, 4-6.
After dropping the fourth set, Murray became visibly upset when Tsitsipas took an eight-minute bathroom break before the winner-take-all fifth set. During that final set, the 34-year-old could be seen saying “it’s cheating” and that Tsitsipas’ break was “nonsense.”
“It’s not so much leaving the court. It’s the amount of time,” Murray said after the match. “It’s nonsense and he knows it. That’s annoying for me because it sounds like sour grapes because you’ve lost a match. I would have said the same thing if I’d won, I promise.
“It’s just disappointing because I feel it influenced the outcome of the match. I’m not saying I necessarily win that match, for sure, but it had an influence on what was happening after those breaks.”
Tsitsipas maintained his innocence throughout, claiming that “as far as I’m playing by the rules and sticking to what the ATP says is fair, then the rest is fine.”
“If there’s something that he has to tell me, we should speak, the two of us, to kind of understand what went wrong,” Tsitsipas continued. “I don’t think I broke any rules. I played by the guidelines, how everything is. I don’t know how my opponent feels when I’m out there playing the match. It’s not really my priority.
“I have nothing against [Murray]. Absolutely nothing.”
But Murray was still seething about it on Tuesday, taking to social media to continue voicing his displeasure while taking a few more jabs at the Greek star.
“Fact of the day,” Murray wrote. “It takes Stefanos Tsitsipas twice as long to go the bathroom as it takes Jeff Bazos to fly into space. Interesting.”
While Murray’s campaign in Queens is done, Tsitsipas meets Frenchman Adrian Mannarino in the second round of the U.S. Open on Wednesday.
This first appeared on AMNY.com
