Who can win the men’s event at this year’s US Open?

With US Open betting well underway, and fans, experts, and bookmakers all trying to decide who the real contenders for the men’s singles event will be, John McEnroe has taken the initiative and announced that he believes only three players can win this
year’s last Grand Slam event: Andy Murray, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.

Whilst these three candidates are all good bets to be there when the event reaches its final stage (although obviously only one of Nadal and Murray can reach the final after they were placed in the same side of the draw), the
difficulty in choosing a winner from this trio is a challenge that not even
McEnroe wished to undertake.

With Murray not ever having won a Grand Slam event and a sense that when he has reached a final previously he has failed to do himself justice, he is arguably the easiest of the three picks to discard as a potential winner.
However, having shown a ruthless side to himself when he chose to sack his
coaching team, combined with the fact that Murray often performs at his best on
hard courts and is going into the 2010 US Open in good form, many pundits and
fans are confident that this could be the time for him to break his duck.

This sense is further enhanced by the fact that Rafael Nadal has clearly shown himself to be far less comfortable performing on hard court surfaces than on either grass courts or clay courts, something that Murray has been able to
exploit in previous hard court tournaments.

With Roger Federer also having shown himself to be losing a touch of the magic that has seen him dominate the game for the majority of the decade, with Nadal having recently edged ahead of him in the rankings, Murray knows this
could be his best opportunity to upset the US
Open tennis odds for quite some time.