Melbourne: Canada’s Milos Raonic fought off a comeback by 2014 champion Stan Wawrinka in a tense five-setter before taking a major scalp and reaching his second straight Australian Open quarter-final on Monday.
Raonic, who earlier spoke of his grief over a high school shooting in his home country, eliminated the Swiss world number four 6-4, 6-3, 5-7, 4-6, 6-3 and will face Gael Monfils in the quarters.
The 13th seed, who upset Wawrinka’s fellow Swiss Roger Federer to win this month’s Brisbane International, remains unbeaten this year after his impressive victory in three hours 44 minutes.
It was Raonic’s first win against the reigning French Open champion in five meetings, and he has not lost a match at tour level since going down to Rafael Nadal in the third round of last year’s Shanghai Masters.
“I’m very happy with the way I competed, the way I turned things around after having the momentum against me going into the fifth set,” Raonic told reporters.
“I felt very clear in what I needed to do and I believed that I could do it. I think that gave me some kind of calm and some kind of peace inside.”
Raonic said new coach Carlos Moya was helping him feel calmer in stressful match situations.
“I feel like I’m putting in the work and I’m getting the results from it. I’m very happy with that,” he said.
“It gives me some kind of ease in those difficult moments, maybe if things aren’t going necessarily my way completely.”
A case in point came when Raonic was on track for a straight-sets win after four service breaks to lead by two sets in 76 minutes.
But Wawrinka lifted his intensity and took the match to a fifth set.
The match turned in the third set when Wawrinka broke Raonic’s serve in the 11th game and served out to keep the encounter alive.
Raonic started missing more and Wawrinka picked up his serving percentage, and he broke the Canadian in the fifth game of the fourth set and fought off four break points on his serve in the eighth game.
Wawrinka steamed to triple set point in the 10th game and took the match into a fifth set with the momentum shifting his way.
But in the final set, Wawrinka lost serve in a shaky sixth game when on second break point his forehand drive was just out, giving Raonic a 4-2 lead.
Wawrinka saved a match point in the eighth game but Raonic brought up a further three match points and finally won it with a put-away at the net.
Raonic, who dedicated his third-round win over Viktor Troicki to victims of last week’s school shooting which left four dead, has yet to beat shotmaker Monfils in their two meetings so far.
“He’s very entertaining and he’s very difficult to play. He can give you complete ends of the spectrum within one game,” Raonic said of Monfils.
“I just have to take the game to him. I have to make him feel uncomfortable. Not let him get into his sort of playing comfort.
“If I can sort of keep up with the efficiency moving forward, I’ll have definitely some opportunities.”
Meanwhile, two nights after his father-in-law was rushed to hospital from a nearby court while Andy Murray was playing at the Australian Open, the four-time finalist put personal distractions aside for long enough to beat Bernard Tomic and advance to the quarterfinals.
An agitated Murray, who insisted he would have stopped playing had Nigel Sears’ condition been more serious than what it was, yelled and berated himself, and had trouble at times before winning 6-4, 6-4, 7-6 (4) Monday in what the Scotsman descrbed as a “scrappy” match against the last Australian in the draw.
