Casey Dellacqua’s six-game winning streak came to an abrupt end at the hands of an even bigger improver on the women’s tennis tour, the Australian easily dispatched by Simona Halep at the Indian Wells Masters tournament.
Riding high after winning through two rounds of qualifying into the main draw, Dellacqua took out another four matches to progress to a quarter-final showdown with Halep.
But Dellacqua proved no match for the electric Romanian who has moved from outside the world’s top 50 in 2013 to her current No.7.
She went down 6-2 6-2.
Still, the West Australian will be well pleased with her efforts, and after being ranked 130 in the world last year, she’s now expected to be just outside the top 60.
Her performance in California follows a solid Australian Open run where she reached the last 16.
Meanwhile in men’s action Milos Raonic rallied in the third set to defeat out-of-sorts fifth seed Andy Murray to reach the quarter-finals.
Raonic, seeded 10th, downed Murray 4-6 7-5 6-3 to line up a quarter-final clash with giant-killer Alexandr Dolgopolov.
The 28th-seeded Ukrainian avoided any letdown in the wake of his third-round upset of world number one Rafael Nadal, powering past 13th-seeded Italian Fabio Fognini 6-2 6-4.
Second-seeded Novak Djokovic, four-time Indian Wells champion Roger Federer, seeded seventh, and Australian Open champion Stanislas Wawrinka were also vying for quarter-final berths on Wednesday.
Murray, who claimed his second grand slam title at Wimbledon last year, has yet to reach a final since having back surgery in September.
But he was at a loss to explain a sudden drop in his level after he had taken the lead in the third set. He was immediately broken to love, and Raonic broke him again for a 4-2 lead that he wouldn’t surrender.
“I think there was mistakes that he made that he wouldn’t have liked to make,” Raonic said. “I think his mistakes were critical that he made in that first break I got.
“But then I felt like I sort of got going a bit more after that. I sort of picked it up for the rest of the set.”
Murray saved one match point as he held for 5-3 in the third, but Raonic was never threatened as he served it out with a game that included two of his 15 aces and a crisp forehand winner on match point.
Still riding high after his triumph over Nadal, Dolgopolov lost just five points on his own serve in the opening set against Fognini, breaking the Italian in the second and eighth games.
Dolgopolov saved all three break points he faced – all in the seventh game of the second set, and a demoralised Fognini delivered three double faults to be broken in the final game.
In another early match, Latvia’s Ernests Gulbis defeated Spain’s Roberto Bautista Agut 7-6 (7-0) 4-6 6-2 in a testy encounter.
