It's not really back to the drawing board for Andy Murray and new coach Amelie Mauresmo, but rather an initial drawing-board encounter.
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Murray, the No. 5 player in the world, lost to Radek Stepanek, ranked 42nd in the world, 7-6 (10), 6-2 in the third round of the Queen's Club Aegon Championships on Thursday. The tournament's defending champion wasted eight set points in the first set, four in a row after racing out to a 6-2 lead in the tiebreak, the Guardian reported.
The loss comes on the heels of much scrutiny of the Murray-Mauresmo pairing. The prevailing wisdom suggests that Mauresmo - for a variety of reasons - will not be to push Murray back into contention for Grand Slam championships.
The early exit seems to confirm that assessment, but Murray certainly was not in panic mode. He suggested in his post-match comments that he was in a much better position to win Queen's Club last year because he missed the French Open due to a bad back.
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"This year I played a lot of matches the last couple of weeks at the French Open," he said, as reported by the Guardian, "whereas coming in last year I probably had about a week, 10 days' preparation on the grass before I started here. On Sunday, I'll be back here for the charity match, then I will start practicing on Sunday evening."
The pairing with Mauresmo is odd only in the fact that after Lendl decided to quit as Murray's coach in March, the Scot said he was going to take his time and make the right decision because he didn't want to hire someone and then have to hire someone else because it wasn't the right fit.
But Mauresmo has signed on only through the grass season, in which the greatest pressure will be on Murray, who also is the defending champion at Wimbledon.
SI.com reported that Murray initially contacted Mauresmo through a text message, and he said he did it because he thought there would be less pressure to have a trial partnership.
"There's a bit less pressure that way than her having to say 'yes' or 'no' to a full-time role," Murray said on his website. "You never know, she could have said 'yes' to the job permanently, only to find after a week of working together that we hated it!"
"At the same time, she could have said 'no' and three weeks later end up regretting it. A trial period just seemed like the right thing to do."
With extra time before Wimbledon, the two will get more time to figure it out - one way or the other.
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