Murray, Nishikori advance to third round on soggy day at U.S. Open

British No. 2 seed and twotime defending Olympic men’s singles champion Andy Murray brushed aside Spain’s Marcel Granollers 64, 61, 64 Thursday afternoon to advance to the U.S. Open third round for the 11th consecutive year, while Japan’s Kei Nishikori moved through with a 64, 46, 64, 63 victory over upandcoming Russian Karen Khachanov.

In a match played under the closed roof on Arthur Ashe Stadium due to rain, Murray, the 2012 champion and 2008 finalist, controlled the match from start to finish against an opponent who lacked the firepower with his serve and ground strokes to pose a serious threat.

Granollers was most competitive in the first set, which took one hour and seven minutes, going down an early break but managing to get the match back on serve at 45.

The 29yearold Murray, however, then reeled off seven of the next eight games to take a commanding twosetstolove lead and finished off the contest in two hours and 22 minutes with one final service hold.

The Scotsman won easily even though his firstserve percentage went from bad to worse throughout the contest, as he put 49 percent of his first serves in play in the first set and made 46 percent and 36 percent in the second and third sets, respectively.

“(The end of the first set) was very tough. I didn’t play that well during that period and managed to come through it thankfully and play some good stuff in the second and third sets,” Murray said in the postmatch press conference.

“I served at like 40, 42 percent first serves or something and still won in straight sets. I must have been doing other things well,” he added.

The statistics told the tale of Murray’s baseline domination, as the Scotsman struck 34 winners to Granollers’ 23 and committed just 28 unforced errors versus the Spaniard’s 47.

With his sixth straight win over Granollers, Murray ran his career record over the world No. 45 to 82.

Next up for the secondranked Scotsman will be the winner of the secondround match pitting France’s Gilles Simon against Italy’s Paolo Lorenzi that had been scheduled to start shortly after noon but did not start until the evening due to steady rain earlier Thursday.

The secondhighest ranked player in Murray’s quarter of the draw, Japanese No. 6 seed Kei Nishikori, was scheduled first on Louis Armstrong Stadium and managed to find a window to complete his victory over Khachanov.

The bighitting 20yearold Russian threw down a score of aces and won 83 percent of his firstserve points, but he still had his service broken five times by Nishikori, one of tennis’ best returners and counterpunchers.

The Japanese star, the U.S. Open runnerup in 2014, will next square off against Frenchman Nicolas Mahut, who defeated countryman PaulHenri Mathieu 64, 64, 62.

Eighthseeded Austrian Dominic Thiem also moved into the third round with a 64, 63, 62 win over Lithuania’s Ricardas Berankis.

In results involving top women players, Romanian No. 5 seed Simona Halep defeated Czech Lucie Safarova 63, 64, sixthseeded American Venus Williams cruised past Germany’s Julia Goerges 62, 63 and 10thseeded Czech Karolina Pliskova topped Paraguay’s Montserrat Gonzalez 61, 75.