The action in the ATP draw continued apace on Thursday in the Caja M\u00e1gica with victories for the top seeds during the afternoon session.<\/p>\n
Andy Murray, the world number two and defending champion, recorded a comfortable 6-4, 6-2 win over Gilles Simon during which he didn\u2019t face a single break point opportunity. \u201cI played intelligent tennis,\u201d Murray said after the match. \u201cThe conditions on court are fast, which allowed me to pick up more free points on my serve and that helped.\u201d Having opened the day\u2019s play on centre court Murray was the first player through to the men\u2019s quarter-finals, where he will meet eighth seed Tomas Berdych.<\/p>\n
The big-serving Czech was out on the Arantxa S\u00e1nchez Vicario show court at the same time, where he knocked out David Ferrer. The ninth seed battled until the end in a match lasting one hour and 55 minutes but could not find a way past Berdych, who took the opening set in a nail-biting tie-break. However, the Spaniard was happy with his performance and viewed his run this week at the Madrid Open in a positive light: \u201cIt\u2019s always important to get some rhythm and carry on working towards the next tournament, because Rome and Roland Garros are coming up,\u201d Ferrer said.<\/p>\n
On Court 3, sixth seed Kei Nishikori beat Richard Gasquet 6-4, 7-5 to reach the quarter-finals, where he will play Nick Kyrgios after the Australian defeated Pablo Cuevas. \u201cEvery year I\u2019m improving,\u201d said Nishikori, a finalist in 2014 at the Caja M\u00e1gica. \u201cI think I\u2019m more consistent than I ever have been and that\u2019s why I\u2019m playing some good tennis.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The action in the ATP draw continued apace on Thursday in the Caja M\u00e1gica with victories for the top seeds during the afternoon session. Andy Murray, the world number two and defending champion, recorded a comfortable 6-4, 6-2 win over Gilles Simon during which he didn\u2019t face a single break point opportunity. \u201cI played intelligent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":77060,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"mc4wp_mailchimp_campaign":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mutua-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mutuamadridopen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mutuamadridopen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mutuamadridopen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mutuamadridopen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mutuamadridopen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mutuamadridopen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77059\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mutuamadridopen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mutuamadridopen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mutuamadridopen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mutuamadridopen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}