It was jolly good fun and a heck of a run while it lasted. Anne Keothavong bade farewell to the US Open yesterday with the feeling in the pit of her stomach that she ought to have made the fifth-best player in the world work an awful lot harder for her passage into the last 16.

Keothavong lost 6-3, 6-4 to Elena Dementieva, the Russian fresh from sampling gold in the women’s singles at the Beijing Olympics and a success that has elevated her from a possible champion at Flushing Meadows to a probable one. And yet the British No 1, whose ranking was good enough for her to play in a main draw away from Wimbledon for the first time, had ten opportunities to break serve, of which she took three. Often it was a case of the better player performing securely when it mattered, but enough of these precious chances were on Keothavong’s racket for her prime emotion to be that of disappointment.

Nevertheless, the 24-year-old’s journey here has been little short of a revelation. At the start of the year, her Sony Ericsson WTA Tour ranking was No 132. In previous years, it has hung defiantly around the 170-200 mark; progress has been bit by bit, a moment of inspiration here followed by another spell eking out victories in the recesses of the tour.

This year, she has won two ITF titles, the second of which, in Lebanon in May was played out while riots were raging in Beirut ten miles away. New York does not seem quite such a fearful place to play tennis when you have experienced a bus journey through Syria to find your way home. Keothavong has set her heart on a top 50 ranking as soon as possible and the experiences like the one here and at Wimbledon in June when she demonstrated a commendable lack of stage fright playing Venus Williams, the defending champion, on Centre Court, will serve her well.

Dementieva is a powerful physical specimen and now that she seems to have cured that awful habit of tossing the ball at a 45-degree angle from where she would be expected to strike it properly, there is something different about her. Twice a finalist in grand-slam tournaments, she reached the semi-finals of Wimbledon this year, but even then, in that decidedly cranky way of hers, she led Nadia Petrova, her compatriot, 6-1, 5-1 in the quarter-finals and held a couple of match points at 6-4 in the second set before winning 6-3 in the third.

It was not entirely implausible that she would got walkabout against Keothavong and there were certainly times when the British player struck the ball just as cleanly off the ground as her opponent, but Dementieva is one of those players who rarely seems to miss and, with her square-on striking style, can change the trajectory of a rally like the flick of a light switch.

“I’m not afraid of these better players,” Keothavong said. “I go out on court and I feel I have a chance against them. Today that was definitely the case, but it just didn’t come together in the way I would have liked it to. But, again, she’s one of the favourites for this tournament and I’m someone who’s ranked 87 in the world right now.”

Roger Federer amassed 46 unforced errors en route to his 6-3, 7-5, 6-4 victory over Thiago Alves, a Brazilian qualifier with the build of a filet mignon, and surely a better player than one ranked No 137 would have profited from such generosity. The smile on the face of the Swiss when he had completed what should have been a routine victory was revealingly broad.

There is as much confusion in Federer’s interviews as there has been in his play this year. “It was kind of difficult mentally, but it was actually fun playing this well and really got the crowd into it,” he said. “I knew the longer the match would go the more tired he would get, so it was was a good match for me.” Er, um. If he says so.

Pride of place yesterday went to Gilles Müller, the qualifier from Luxembourg, who came back from a two-set deficit against Tommy Haas – a quarter-finalist here in three of the past four years - and won 2-6, 2-6, 7-6, 7-6, 6-3 to set up a third-round match against Nicolas Almagro, the No 18 seed from Spain.



Davis Cup lineup

Great Britain team (v Austria at the All England Club, Wimbledon, September 19 to 21): Andy Murray, Alex Bogdanovic, Jamie Murray, Ross Hutchins.

Head-to-head meetings: Great Britain 7, Austria 3.

Last meeting: 2004, when Austria beat Great Britain 3-2 in Pörtschach in the World Group play-offs.