Milos Raonic to meet Andy Murray in the round of 16 at Indian Wells

INDIAN WELLS, Calif. – After a bit of a close shave in his first match back from a two-month injury layoff, Canadian Milos Raonic was back to his usual recipe Monday at the BNP Paribas Open.

Hold your serve comfortably, put pressure on him to hold his serve, step it up at a few key moments, mix it all together, and advance to the fourth round.

Raonic defeated Colombian lefthander Alejandro Falla, a player who can summon up good enough tennis at times to pull off an upset or two, 6-4, 6-3 in a routine victory that bore little resemblance to his first Indian Wells win over Edouard Roger-Vasselin of France.

Instead of 33 aces, there were fewer than a dozen. Instead of nerves, it was back to his regularly scheduled programming.

“I was returning much better, and that was a big factor, but also I was taking care of my serve, which was the most important part,” said Raonic, who will now play Andy Murray in the round of 16 on Wednesday.

Raonic was sore Sunday after playing singles and doubles on Saturday – more tennis than he has played in the entirety of the last two months.

And he had another double-header Monday, as he and partner Ernests Gulbis played before a big and appreciative Stadium 2 crowd until about 11:30 p.m., losing to the Swiss dream team of Roger Federer and Stanislas Wawrinka 7-6, 7-6.

The two were laughing a lot in the first set, although things got rather more serious after that – until Gulbis double-faulted the last two points of the match.

To say the entire crowd was expecting the second one to occur would be to understate the case.

Raonic said the wacky Gulbis, not surprisingly, is an absolute scream to play with, not so much what he says, but how and when he says it.

As much as the doubles serves a purpose – Raonic, as with many of the players, likes to play doubles at Indian Wells because if there’s a premature loss in singles, it can be nearly two weeks until they can play again in a similar Masters 1000 tournament in Miami.

But in this case, he also got to see some significant champions across the net: Novak Djokovic in his first-round match, and Federer and Wawrinka Monday night.

As for Murray, Raonic has had the best of him in two of their three encounters.

He defeated him in Tokyo, and on the clay in Barcelona.

That match was at the 2012 U.S. Open, and Murray won 6-4, 6-4, 6-2.

Both are coming off injury layoffs; Murray had back surgery last fall and still isn’t fully back to his usual high standards, while this is Raonic’s first tournament since the Australian Open in mid-January.