FOR all Andy Murray’s struggles this year, there is nothing like seeing one of your biggest rivals being put through the ringer to make you feel a bit better about life.

The defending champion Novak Djokovic needed five sets to get past a resilient baseliner in Diego Schwartzman, 5-7 6-3 3-6 6-1 6-1 in the third round yesterday and you can bet that somewhere here, world No 1 Murray had one eye on it.

Watching Djokovic be pulled around the court and struggle to make the right choice for the first three sets created a feeling that has become commonplace in the past 12 months for the previously almost invincible Serb.

Murray’s other eye, of course, will have been on today’s potentially epic encounter with Juan Martin Del Potro in the third round at Roland Garros.

The pair have met nine times, with Murray leading 6-3, but if today’s clash is anything like the two meetings they had in 2016, then it promises to be a classic.

Murray wore down Del Potro in four grueling sets to win Olympic gold in Rio last summer before the Argentinian got his revenge by winning a five-set slug fest in the opening rubber of the Davis Cup semi-final last September.

Del Potro may be hampered slightly by a niggling groin strain that affected him in the previous round but Murray is aware that after two tough wins, this is likely to be the litmus test of where his game stands going into the second week.

“I think the Davis Cup one was physically tough for me because it came off the back of a long summer,” Murray said as he considered their two battles of 2016.

“The Olympics was physically hard and hard mentally and psychologically but I had also come off a period of rest and trained and prepared for it whereas when you get to Davis Cup I’d played the Olympics, gone to Cincinnati, then New York and back for Davis Cup.

“But he also will remember those matches and they weren’t easy for him either, they were tough for him and I will try to make it the same for him again.”

Murray feels Del Potro is one of the very best players in the world, certainly better than his current ranking of No.30 would suggest, which in itself is a sterling effort given his wrist problems, which have required three surgeries.

The Scot played some good stuff in his first two wins here and his confidence has been helped by the best-of-five-set format used in the grand slams.

“I’ve certainly played way better here than I did in Rome or Madrid, so it does help,” he said.

“It’s more the length of the matches that helps. Sometimes you lose a quick set in a best of three and you’re not feeling great you don’t have time to figure it out.

“But here you do and it just feels like it’s a bit less pressure in the tactical side and you have time to work your way in and I’ve done that here.”

It seems amazing now to think that it is only a year since Djokovic completed the career grand slam with his first French Open title, a win that gave him a fourth straight grand slam crown.

Since then, though he reached the final of the US Open and the ATP World Tour Finals, something has not been quite right about Djokovic and he was all at sea in the first three sets against the 24-year-old Schwartzman.

He righted the ship in the fourth and fifth sets and with Andre Agassi, his coach, now heading home because of prior commitments, the Serb will hope the confidence gained by a tough win will help him improve in the coming rounds.

In probably 70, 80 per cent of the slam wins I have had, I had at least one tough four-setter or five-setter maybe early in the tournament.

“It's good because it allows you to kind of enter the tournament, in a way, mentally, as and just get challenged early so you can break through.”

Rafael Nadal, meanwhile, continues to steamroll his opponents, with his 6-0, 6-1, 6-0 win over Nikoloz Basilashvili of Georgia, the most one-sided win the nine-times champion has ever had.