Twelve months ago Andy Murray headed for the Hamburg Masters as the world No 10, his ranking buoyed by a fine start to the year. He had successfully defended his San Jose title and finished runner-up in Doha, played in successive Masters Series semi-finals in Indian Wells and Miami, and equalled his best performance in a Grand Slam event by reaching the fourth round of the Australian Open, where he lost a five-set thriller to Rafael Nadal.
As Murray, now the world No 18, prepares for this year’s Hamburg Masters, which begins on Sunday, he may well reflect on the events of the last year. His memories of the Hamburg tournament will no doubt be painful, for it was at this event that he suffered the wrist injury that wrecked his summer. The British No 1 was back on court again within three months, but although he has since added three more titles to his cv – St Petersburg, Doha and Marseille – he has yet to recover all the ground he has lost since last spring.
In particular, Murray’s yield from the most important events of 2008 has been disappointing. He lost in the first round in the Australian Open, where he had the misfortune to be drawn against Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, while his best performances in Masters series events have been runs to the last 16 in both Indian Wells and Monte-Carlo, where he was beaten by Tommy Haas and Novak Djokovic respectively. In Miami Murray lost to Mario Ancic in his opening contest and here at the Rome Masters he won one match before going down in straight sets to Stanislas Wawrinka.
Clay is by no means alien to Murray, who trained on it as a teenager at the Sanchez-Casal academy in Barcelona, but the surface has been his least productive since his arrival in the senior ranks. His 2006 and 2007 seasons were so dogged by injury that he played just nine tour matches on clay in 24 months, winning only twice.

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