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“The match started off okay, I got broken and I broke back to love,” Matosevic said afterwards.

“But then it all happened at 3-3. It was 30-15 to me and in a rally he seemed to twist his ankle and that gave me 40-15. He gestured to his coach and said something in Dutch like it was all over. Then he started walking to net towards me and I thought he was going to shake hands.

“Then he said he was going to call an injury time out which he did, he got treated for however long it takes.

“Then I came out, put the ball in the court and he kept on hitting winners. Before I knew it I was 6-3 3-0 down. I managed to break back and had a chance at 4-4, 30-all. He held at 5-4 then I got broken to love. I put in another bad game which I had done a few times during the match.”

It was the kind of match that the Australian could – and should – have won. With a career high ranking of No.122, which perhaps does not do justice to his ability to push the top players, as he demonstrated at Indian Wells, Matosevic simply struggled to come to terms with the fact that the match wasn’t over in the first set.

“I didn’t handle it very well,” he admitted.

“It’s never easy playing injured players and I definitely didn’t handle it well at all. I couldn’t deal with the fact that I thought the match was over for a second and then all of a sudden I’m 6-3 3-0 down.”

But as with any match of this sort, the key is to look for the positives. Needless to say, this isn’t always possible straight after a defeat.

“It’s hard to find the positives for stuff that let me down. Tony Roach mentioned some things that are important that I wasn’t aware of, so I’ve just got to keep working hard and improving that stuff,” Matosevic said.