Tashkent: Sania Mirza crashed out against a lower seed Russian opponent in the quarter-finals of the $145,000 Tashkent Open Tennis tournament at Tashkent on Friday.
The Indian, seeded third, was upset by sixth seed Olga Poutchkova 4-6, 6-4, 0-6.
It was another inconsistent performance by Sania, who said she never really adjusted to the conditions at the Tashkent Tennis Centre.
"Sometimes you don't get used to the conditions and then you don't win" said Mirza, who also admitted she was low on confidence.
"The balls were flying, I just didn't get to feel the ball on my racket... I haven't been feeling the ball in the last three matches. There were some 20-25 times in the match when I wanted to go for a winner but I didn't have the confidence to go for it, I just kept pushing the ball back," she said.
Mirza's discomfort was visible during the 1-hour, 42-minute match, in which there were 14 breaks of serve.
After losing the first set, hitting wide an inside-out backhand at set point, Mirza slumped to a 0-4 deficit in the second.
Poutchkova, semi-finalist at the recent Sunfeast Open in Kolkata, then double-faulted three times to drop serve in the next game. That triggered a mini-Mirza revival and she won the next five games to take the set.
During the six-game winning streak, she seemed to have regained some confidence and the winners flowed from her racket.
But Poutchkova recovered quickly and won the key points in the early games of the third set. Mirza, down 15-40 after a double fault, rallied to deuce in the second game, but could not hold serve.
In the next game, she had two points for a break back. Again Poutchkova willed herself to hold.
Mirza eventually threw in the towel when, after rallying from 0-40 down in the fourth game, she was again broken and went 4-0 down in the set.
"It was a weird match," said Mirza.
"I was very patchy the whole match, she (Poutchkova) is high on confidence. She hung in there stronger in the third set (games two and three). She didn't play her best tennis either, I've seen her play much better, but she was playing much better than I did."
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