USO Blog

05 September, 2008 | 22:09

So what does Andy Murray get up to after training with two days to go until his first ever Grand Slam semi-final?

Sit in his room and watch TV? Twiddle his thumbs nervously?

Nah, he gets himself down to Chelsea Pier in New York for a hit in the batting cages, followed by some dinner...

All of which means a lot of guys standing around in hard hats for an hour whilst balls whizz their way at 70mph.

It's pretty simple: you put some tokens in the machine, get into the batting cage, and wait for the pitching machine to start spitting balls at you from the other end.

There's a load of different cages, all with different picthing speeds; you can start in a slow cage and build up. The guys went for a 'medium', which is 65-70mph.

Here's Jez and Andy catching a glimpse of AI as he sticks his baseball hat on....

And here's AI in action, with a slightly unconventional batting stance....

The two girls were waiting for their football (sorry, soccer game) to start next door and offered the odd bit of advice, which mostly consisted of put downs.

The follow through is a bit suspect too....

No surprise that Andy was better than everyone else.

Something for everyone to aspire to: the adults doing it for real in the big leagues....

There's a fair amout of banter flying around as you can imagine. Here's AI, Treacle and Andy hoping that Jez misses yet another pitch....

To be fair, Jez was pretty handy too. The secret - it seems - is to start swinging the bat as soon as you see the ball making its way through the machine, and not after it's actually flying towards you...

By the end of the night, everyone had improved a fair bit. No more so than AI, who was stood at the plate looking like Ken Griffey Jnr...