Andy Murray squeezed his way into the last-eight at the Miami Open, but not before he had lost the second set to the South African Kevin Anderson. The Scot regained his composure in the deciding set to continue his quest for a third title in the American event. The number one seed Novak Djokovic is also safely through to the quarter-finals, but again needed a third set before overcoming Alexandr Dolgopolov.
Murray also reached the notable landmark of 500 career wins by outlasting the number 15 seed Anderson. He is now one of the nine players still on the tour to have reached the milestone, with 46 men in total in the open-era with 500 or more victories.
The number three seed (with Roger Federer not playing in Miami) had looked confident early on in the last-16 tie, taking the first set after breaking Anderson's serve at the first opportunity, but then seemed to lose his way in set two as the Anderson serving bombardment continued. Murray fell 4-0 behind after dropping his own serve twice and although he did rally towards the end of the set, it was not enough to wrestle the early advantage back and so the match went into the deciding third set. Britain's number one was able to regain the momentum from earlier in the match with an early break to close out a hard-fought contest 6-4 3-6 6-3. He will face the unseeded Austrian Dominic Thiem in the next round, after he beat Adrian Mannarino in three sets.
Djokovic suffered an early scare against Dolgopolov of the Ukraine, losing the first set on a tie-break. Set two was also close, but the Serb edged it to force the match to go all the way. He then upped his game significantly as his opponent withered, bagelling him to clinch his quarter-final place with a 6-7 7-5 6-0 victory.
The last-eight line-up includes a few surprises, after the Canadian number five seed Milos Raonic was slightly surprisingly knocked out by America's hard serving giant John Isner. The battle of the big servers was decided by three tie-breaks, with Isner decisively taking the last two sets. Spain's Fernando Verdasco (seeded 29) was also knocked out, this time in straight sets by Juan Monaco from Argentina.
The last-eight is confirmed as (seeding in brackets):
Novak Djokovic (1) v David Ferrer (6)
Kei Nishikori (4) v John Isner (22)
Dominic Thiem v Andy Murray (3)
