Not a good day for New Zealand players Erin Routliffe and Michael Venus in their respective doubles quarterfinals at the US Open.
As top seeds and defending champions Routliffe and Dabrowski lost to Chan Hao-Ching (Taipei) and Russian Veronika Kudermetova after winning the first set, twice being up a break in the second, and a break up in the third before dropping the last five games.
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The eventual score was 6-4 5-7 3-6 in over two and a half hours with Routliffe and Dabrowski made 45 unforced errors, 34 of which came in the last two sets.
The loss ended their run of nine consecutive victories at the tournament and will most likely see Routliffe drop from the world No 1 ranking to two or three.
"I think they changed their games a little bit. I think we had a lot of chances to break all the time. The unforced errors probably cost a little bit. We had control but let it get out of our hands.
"That was our fourth slam together and every time we've mad ethe quarters or better, so in that sense it's pleasing," said 29-year-old Routliffe.
The next tournament for Routliffe and Dabrowski are the two WTA 1000 tournaments at Beijing and Wuhan followed by possibly Tokyo and the WTA finals.
Meanwhile, in the men's doubles, eighth seeds Venus and Britain's Neal Skupski lost to the fourth-seeded pair of El Salvadoran Marcelo Arevalo and Croatian Mate Pavic also on the Grandstand Court.
The scoreline of 7-6(1) 6-1 an apt summary of the match as Venus, in his first US Open quarterfinal, and Skupski went point-for-point until the tiebreak where their opponents quickly got out to a lead and did not look back
Venus and Skupski had two chances to break serve, but were not able to, however, Arevalo and Pavic achieved two breaks and managed 32 winners in total compared to 19 for the Kiwi-British combination.
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