ROME: Andy Murray admitted he was delighted to have made history in Rome by becoming the first British player to reach the semi-finals in 79 years.The world number four saw off Germany’s Florian Mayer 1-6, 6-1, 6-1 in his quarter-final to equal Pat Hughes’s achievement of 1932, the last British man to make the last four.As for making history, a humble Murray said he was delighted to have progressed this far in a tournament in which he had never before even reached the last eight.”It is important, it’s nice to do well in tournaments abroad and this tournament has been around a long, long time,” he said.”There’s a lot of history, it’s always had great fields. Every year I’ve been here when you walk to the practice courts there’s a list of winners down a wall that has a lot of great players down there.”Murray’s victory meant he will face either Novak Djokovic or Robin Soderling in the last four.
Ahead of that match Djokovic was unbeaten in 2011 and the Scot admitted he would like to face the man of the moment.”It would be great to play him. I have not actually seen him hit the ball this week,” said Murray.”I saw him in Madrid and obviously in the States too. He was playing very, very well and it would be a very good test for me.”He is hitting the ball well and I definitely will not be able to get away with playing like I did (against Mayer).”But the way I hit the ball in the second and third sets and the way I have been playing this week, then I will have a good chance.”Meanwhile, Murray believes he needs to show more raw emotion on court just as he did to battle back to defeat Mayer.”I think I probably needed to let some emotions out, especially at the beginning of the second set and when I started to get things going, I was getting myself pumped up,” he said.”I was a bit confused in the first set and not really thinking my way through the points.”At the end of the first set I had a toilet break to see what I needed to do differently and I managed to turn it around.”I needed to get some emotion into the match. He doesn’t really say much on the court and he makes you feel a little bit inferior because of the way that he plays.”He makes the game look quite easy and it is just very strange, so I needed to get myself pumped up, get my legs moving and I seemed to get back into it.” – Yahoonews
