He never makes it easy, Neil, does he? What did you think of Murray's display in reaching his first ever grand-slam semi-final?

It was a riveting match and Murray ultimately achieved what he had set out to do all along and go one better than Wimbledon [where he reached the quarter-finals]. There was some exceptional tennis from both players, so many ups and downs and just when you thought the young Briton had it in the bag he produced some typically frustrating Murray moments. You could point to Murray’s fitness being one of the decisive factors – he was relatively fresh at the end while Del Potro was out on his feet.

Could it be a case of last man standing wins, then?

The US Open is the most attritional tournament of them all. Most of the players remaining are extremely fatigued after Beijing and perhaps Andy having had such a disaster in the Olympics is working in his favour because he certainly looks a lot fresher than most.

The fitness does look good, agreed, but how on earth did Murray manage to prolong a match he appeared to have won easily?

At 3-1 up in the third set he let himself get a bit into defensive mode. Del Potro had to react at some stage, here was a man who had won 23 straight matches so he wasn’t just going to lie down. But from a position where it appeared Murray was going to win in straight sets suddenly it could easily have been two sets all. Lapses like those from Andy do not last long and he dug deep again as he invariably does as he dragged the match round with sheer force of will and once more showed what we know already – that he has bagfuls of guts.

After all the pre-match hype about there being "previous" in Rome when Del Potro made a remark about Murray's mother, there did not appear to be carry-over. In fact, far from being a "grudge match" the spirit between the two seemed to be good, or did you detect any under-current?

There was a gracious ending to the match and some Argentinian journalists came over to me afterwards and said they had been happy to see how if finished, with the mutual respect shown by two great competitors. We tried to listen in on what Andy said to Del Potro as they shook hands, I think he was asking him how he was because obviously Del Potro was suffering physically and no-one likes to see their opponent injured like that.

How do you think the US TV bigwigs were feeling when Murray's match ate into the prime-time slot that had been earmarked for the women's quarter-final match between the Williams sisters?

In similar circumstances yesterday the tournament organisers showed no remorse in shunting Jelena Jankovic, the No 2 seed, out on to the Louis Armstrong court – they never would have done that with the Williams sisters. If a match is scheduled for a show court it should stay on a show court, whoever you are. We had the ridiculous occurrence of a women’s doubles match opening on Arthur Ashe which took more than two hours and threw the timing off of everything else. It was arguably the most incompetent piece of scheduling I have witnessed in 25 years of covering tennis.

Neil Harman was talking to Richard Neale