Andy Murray exits US Open 2013 as he is beaten in straight sets by Stanislas Wawrinka The subdued nature of Murray's performance only underlined how low his batteries are running. We saw something of a slump at the end of last year after his first grand slam title. Now we are seeing it again after his second, which was perhaps an even bigger deal because of the Fred Perry factor and all the hoopla surrounding a British player at Wimbledon. When Wawrinka turned on the power, we looked for all the typical Murray signatures: the penetrating service returns, the calibrated passing shots and the improbable recoveries. They simply did not show up. He went through the match without a single break point, an almost unheard-of statistic for one of the best returners the game has seen. The disappointment was that we were expecting a classic quarter-final. A more plugged-in Murray would have made this a better spectacle, and certainly a closer one. Yet there is no guarantee he would have won, for Wawrinka is playing the best tennis of his life. Ever since he pushed Novak Djokovic to 12-10 in the deciding set in Melbourne in January, he has looked like a man on the verge of a big result. Yesterday he got one. By modern standards, Wawrinka is not the tallest of tennis players at 6ft. But he is a burly, bearlike figure who transmits every ounce of that strength into the ball. Like his fourth-round victim Tomas Berdych, he can take the game out of your hands by crunching winners from almost any position. Rallying with him doesn't work too well: the only way to stop the stream of missiles is to launch a pre-emptive strike, so using attack as a form of defence. Murray is at his most uncomfortable against power players like these. Ivan Lendl might have helped him step up closer to the baseline, but under pressure he still reverts to his old instinct to hang in the point and wait for an opening. Perhaps this might have worked if Murray had established a rhythm, but Wawrinka refused to let him. The Swiss was smart in the way he kept swinging for the rafters, and maintaining the staccato feeling of the points. You felt he would rather play a big shot and miss than allow Murray to establish any kind of bridgehead. Perhaps the critical moment was the 10th game, which found Murray serving at 4-5. On another blustery day, he never seemed to have much confidence in his first serve, which averaged less than 100mph over the course of the match. Now, there were two double-faults in a 16-minute game that went to deuce eight times. Murray was bloody-minded enough to stave off five set points, but the sixth found him pushing a forehand long - another trope of the evening. This continued the pattern of Murray's slow starts in a tournament in which he had already dropped sets to two relatively low-ranked players: Leonardo Mayer of Brazil and Denis Istomin of Uzbekistan. Against them, he had enough class and self-belief to pull the match around. But Wawrinka is a different matter: he is almost as good a front-runner as his more famous compatriot Roger Federer. Murray will return home to decompress for a couple of days before taking up his Davis Cup assignment in Croatia next week. For the first time in his last five grand slams, he has failed to reach the final. But still, when viewed dispassionately, this has been another fine year for a man who had yet to win a major title 12 months ago. Wawrinka will face the winner of last night's late match between Djokovic and Mikhail Youzhny in the semi-final, the man he so nearly ejected from the Australian Open. The other semi-final will bring together Rafael Nadal and Richard Gasquet. This one looks easier to call, as Gasquet has lost 10 straight matches to Nadal since joining the professional ranks. In the past, the Frenchman has developed a reputation for being something of a soft touch, despite his unmistakable talent and the most flowing backhand in the game. But he has shown a new steeliness this week by winning back-to-back five-setters, the first one against Milos Raonic on Monday.