Free Of Shingles, Murray Advances In Dubai

Andy Murray looked in fine form and fully recovered from his short bout with shingles during his Dubai opener on Tuesday. The top seed coasted past Tunisia’s Malek Jaziri 6-4, 6-1 in 79 minutes at the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships to win their first FedEx ATP Head2Head meeting.

“I have never hit with him or played against him before. It took a little bit of time to get used to his game. But I played better as the match went on,” Murray said.

The Scot landed only 40 per cent of his first serves but overcame the low percentage by defending his second serve well, taking nearly 70 per cent of those points (19/29). Murray was broken once but converted four of his eight break-point opportunities against the 33-year-old Jaziri, who reached the Dubai quarter-finals in 2014.

“The only thing I didn’t do well was the first serve… I’m not sure exactly why. Maybe first match under the lights, haven’t practised in those conditions since I have been here,” Murray said.

The World No. 1 will next meet Spaniard Guillermo Garcia-Lopez. The Brit leads their FedEx ATP Head2Head series 2-1, but they haven’t played since the 2012 BNP Paribas Open.

Win or lose, Murray is thankful to be healthy. He discovered that he had shingles, or adult chickenpox, upon returning from the Australian Open last month. He shared how he learned of the illness on Tuesday with reporters in Dubai.

“I had a little bit of a rash basically like on my bum ’round to kind of my stomach, and it wasn’t terrible. But then normally if you have a little bit of a rash and you scratch it, it feels better. But with that, it was really, really painful.

“I didn’t think much of it at the beginning, and then it was actually my wife’s mum, we were having dinner, and I was, like, ‘This is really irritating’. She was, like, ‘Pull your pants down. Show me. It might be shingles,’” Murray said to laughs.

“I was, like, ‘OK’. Then the next day, got a doctor, and she was right.”

Murray continued, saying his wife’s mum probably guessed shingles because her son Scott had experienced the illness in the past. “It’s quite strange,” Murray said of the illness, “because it comes in like an arc and it doesn’t go past the centre of your body. It stays on one side.”

Murray fans shouldn’t worry, though. He said he took some anti-viral medicine and applied a cream, and that he’s all better.

“The rash is completely gone now, and I felt fine when I was training. I don’t think I’d be able to do what I was doing out there this evening if [I still had it],” he said. “A lot of people said that afterwards, once the rash is gone, that you can feel very tired for quite a few weeks, a number of weeks afterwards. I was maybe a little bit more tired than usual at the beginning, but I really feel fine now.”