A year ago Andy Murray took to the Centre Court at the Queen's Club and with visibly hampered movement lost in straight sets to Australia's Jordan Thompson. It was his first main tour loss to an Australian player. In the weeks that followed reports emerged of a right hip injury and he struggled through to the quarter finals of Wimbledon, before hobbling away from the tour and, if you believed the media reports, and extremely uncertain future in competitive tennis. The hip problem it later emerged was once he'd been managing for the best part of a decade and some court-side photographers believe the problem was already evident during the Rome Masters in May 2017, if not the week before in Madrid, but the official line is that Andy began to feel pain in that hip during the semi-final battle with Stan Wawrinka - who also ended his season early for a major knee surgery last summer - at Roland Garros.
This afternoon Andy finally makes his return to the tour after eleven months of rehab, two surgeries, and more even rehab. His opponent today will be another Australian, Nick Kyrgios, who echoed the sentiments of many of Andy's fans when he described the ATP tour as being 'shitty' without Britain's best player of the open era. Now Britian's number three player, Andy has no on-court expectations for today's match, or those in the coming weeks; he simply wants to go out on court and play tennis.
The often staid Queen's Club crowd will surely give the record holding five-time Queen's champion a rapturous welcome when he takes to the court later this afternoon. His fan's watching at home will certainly be cheering for him loudly.
The match is third on Centre, at an estimated time of 3.30pm BST. The weather is forecast to be sunny with some cloud, temperatures of around 24 degrees Celsius, a south westerly wind of up to 10pmh, and humidity of approximately 54%.
Andy leads the H2H 5-0, though Kyrgios did beat him once at the Hopman Cup at the start of 2016 - a season which Andy began with a sore hip and ended as world number one.
