Murray recovers from service lapse to advance

NEW YORK, Aug 31 (Reuters) Briton Andy Murray recovered from a bout of poor serving to beat hard-hitting American Robert Kendrick in the US Open first round.

The 19-year-old Murray won 6-2 1-6 6-3 6-3 in two hours and 18 minutes to set up a second-round match against Italian Alessio Di Mauro yesterday.

''I knew it was going to be difficult,'' the 17th seed told reporters. ''He hits the ball pretty hard. He's got a big serve.

He's pretty flashy, can hit some big winners.

''But if you can keep enough balls in court and deep he can get a bit impatient and start making mistakes.'' Murray cruised through the opening set by breaking Kendrick's serve twice, but in the second he was broken twice himself.

After firing four aces and winning 80 percent of his first-serve points in the opening set, Murray failed to deliver an ace in the second and won just 50 percent of points on his first serve.

But he credited the 26-year-old Kendrick for stepping up his game.

''I'm going to say he hit at least 20 winners in that set,'' Murray said. ''I couldn't have done much about it. I thought I played pretty well apart from that.'' Murray rediscovered his serve in the third and fourth sets to ease to victory over the 143rd-ranked Kendrick who made 37 unforced errors in the final two sets.

Under the watchful eye of new coach Brad Gilbert, Murray finished with eight aces and a 50 percent first-serve percentage.

''He (Kendrick) goes for shots that are not really on,'' said Murray. ''He can he can do it for a set, two sets but to keep it up over five sets is really difficult.

''When you play high risk tennis like that the law of averages says that he's going to play two or three bad sets out of six. It's difficult to maintain a standard like that.'' REUTERS PM RAI0901