IF A week is a long time in politics – and three weeks spent trawling through politicians' expenses claims an eternity – then four years is a lifetime in tennis.
It was four years ago at Roland Garros that a skinny teenager from Dunblane lost in the semi-finals of the French Open junior tournament. He was the US Open junior champion at the time, but as he huffed and puffed against an even taller and skinnier
kid, finally losing his temper along with the match, he realised that this junior malarkey was no longer for him.
On another, bigger court Rafael Nadal was being cheered on to his first senior French Open title and our hero wanted to be a part of that story instead. He had no more patience for the junior competitions and on that afternoon, as Andy Murray lost to Marin Cilic on an outside court, the Scot realised that he was ready to take the biggest step of his career: Murray had come of age and was ready to mix it with the grown-ups.
History, though, has a strange habit of repeating itself and just as Murray is about to take another massive step in his career development, up pops Marin Cilic again. Today the two young men will do battle for a place in the quarter-finals of the French Open. For both, the match could prove a turning point in their careers: for Cilic, it would his first appearance in the last eight at any grand slam, while for Murray it would mark a breakthrough in his clay-court progression and move him even closer to Roger Federer's No.2 spot in the world rankings.
Clay is still Murray's weakest surface and when he arrived in Paris his first goal was to reach the second week of the tournament. He achieved that by beating Janko Tipsarevic on Friday evening – the Serb retired with a hamstring injury after two sets – but if he can now go on and muscle his way through to the latter stages of the competition, he will have proved that he is a force to be reckoned with on any surface and in any situation.
When Murray reached the US Open final last year, he was playing like a man on a mission. Closing himself off from all outside distractions (he admitted to being "pretty boring" during those two weeks) he put his head down and ploughed through the rounds. But New York is his favourite city and an American hard court is his favourite surface to play on. On clay in Paris, it is not quite the same, yet Murray is trying to use every scrap of his grand slam experiences to push him on to the quarter-finals and beyond.
"You have to try and approach all the slams the same," he said. "My aim was to try and get to the second week here and obviously I plan on winning every match that I play. It's not like I go out in the next round and think 'yeah, I've done a good job in getting this far'. I'm going to try my best to win the tournament and the next match but I guess not look ahead of the next opposition. If I don't play well then I'll probably lose.
"The first week's been good and I played a few tough players. A lot of people thought I had a very tricky draw and I've come through some tough situations, but I haven't used up too much energy and I think it's obviously been good. Winning's the most important thing and secondly is to not use up too much energy. The higher-ranked players tend to play better as the tournament goes on and hopefully next week I'll play better than I did this week."
The gangling Cilic stands 6ft 6in tall and, like Murray, has had his greatest successes on hard courts. He is 16 months younger than the Scot and his development is, accordingly, a year behind Murray's: he has made a habit of reaching the fourth round of grand slams recently, but has never progressed any further; he won his first tournament title last summer and has added two more this year and in Paris; he has not dropped a set on his way to the second week. Like Murray was in 2007, he is on the verge of the next major step up in his career path. He has also never beaten Murray on the main tour, but his two meetings with the Scot have been close and tight.
"He serves well and, for a big guy, he moves good," Murray said. "He plays different, I guess, and him and Del Potro – for two huge guys – play different games to how you would expect maybe ten or 15 years ago: they don't come to the net that much and they play mainly from the back, hitting big ground strokes. He's solid, he serves well, he's got big groundies and, for his height, he moves well at the back of the court."
Yet Murray is no slouch himself and as the first week of Roland Garros drew to a close, he was reasonably happy with his achievements. Everything could, he thought, be improved, but the first three rounds had not been bad. "I've returned way better this week than I did in the rest of the clay-court season," Murray said, "and movement – I've moved pretty well. And ground strokes: I've hit a lot of winners. Just try and play consistently well for the whole of the matches and not have little let downs, I guess, would be the goal for next week."
And if he could finally beat Cilic at Roland Garros then the junior competition of 2005 really would seem like a lifetime ago.
