PARIS, May 25, 2016

Andy Murray, who battled past Radek Stepanek over two days at Roland Garros, and coach Amélie Mauresmo announced the ‘mutual’ end of the their partnership earlier this month. Afterwards the former world number one from France was quoted in different papers: “Andy is complex. On court, he can be opposite of what he is in life”. His behaviour was an alleged reason for the split. Murray was willing to talk about this rumour after his first round win in Paris.

“Me and Amélie have a very good relationship, and I don’t think it’s fair to try to say otherwise. You know, I did an interview before the tournament, before anything that Amélie had said had come out. And the last two days was supposedly that I was hitting back at Amélie’s comments and disagreeing with everything that she said and that we had a really tough breakup. That simply is not true,” Murray wanted to clarify.

“When we sat down in Madrid, it was far from heated. We spoke very calmly the whole time. And, you know, to say that the reason that we stopped working together is because of my behavior on the court, that is not true. We, in Madrid when we spoke, we didn’t discuss that one time. So that isn’t true.

For sure, when we were working together, we discussed many things on the court, and there was times when, like with all of my coaches, they said, you need to concentrate more on the match. Stop directing your frustration at the box and being distracted from what’s going on on the court. But to say that that’s why we stopped working together is untrue. Obviously what’s happened the last few days has been difficult, because I didn’t have a chance to talk about it.”

Murray is still in contact with Mauresmo.

“She sent me a message a couple of days ago. And, yeah, I’m sure we’ll see each other here at some stage. The last two days for me have been pretty busy. Me and Amélie have a good relationship. We certainly didn’t fall out. And that is not true. And I have always been, I think, tried to be quite honest and open about things.

“That’s what was most disappointing for me is that the reason we stopped working together, we discussed it in Madrid, and what was said at the time was the fact that we literally are spending hardly any time together in a three-month period right before major events coming up. And she was not able to help me during that period. That’s what happened.”