If you look very carefully in the sports section you will see that some events other than a pair of miserable England performances took place yesterday. Buried down below the rugby post-mortems, below the analyses of the football performance in Montenegro, down just above the foreign football results and the CLT20 news you will see that Andy Murray made it to the final of the Japan Open.
Murray has been playing very well recently. Last week he easily won the Thailand Open and has won eleven consecutive matches and 22 of his last 23. The problem he will face in the final is Rafael Nadal. Nadal the #2 in the world. Nadal who has inflicted two of Murray’s last three defeats and knocked him out of the last three Grand Slams. Murray has defeated Nadal before, of course. Most memorable was in the quarter finals of the 2010 Australian Open, but also in the final of the ABN AMRO World Tennis Tournament. (Yeah, I had to look that up.) The latter tournament is on the same level as the Japan Open, so there is a smidgen of hope for Murray. Fingers crossed.
The match, near as I can tell, will be on Sunday (9 October) at 06.00 BST, 00.00 CDT. It might also be two hours earlier. I saw two different statements on the tournament’s website, and I’m not certain I correctly translated from Japanese time to BST. (All of the news stories on that site, by the way, are punctuated with double exclamation marks. Somehow it seems appropriate.) Unfortunately if I’m right this is the same time at which the third RWC quarter final starts, so I’ll probably be watching that.
Defensive Indifference 