Andy Murray and Serena Williams’ memorable Wimbledon run is over after they lost to top seeds Bruno Soares and Nicole Melichar in the mixed doubles.

Britain’s Murray, 32, and American Williams, 37, have illuminated SW19 with their blockbuster partnership but came unstuck in a 6-3 4-6 6-2 defeat.

The loss means the Scot’s Wimbledon return – almost six months after serious hip surgery – is over.

Now he must decide the next step as he ultimately hopes to play singles again.

On Tuesday, Murray said playing singles at the US Open in September looks “pretty unlikely” as he continues to take his recovery cautiously.

After their exit on Wednesday, the former British number one said: “I think I achieved a lot.

“I got on the court and considering the lack of matches, I did OK. The most positive thing is that my body felt good.”

Williams still has a chance of silverware as she plays Czech Barbora Strycova – British number one Jo Konta’s conqueror – in the singles semi-finals on Thursday.

The 23-time Grand Slam champion said she has “loved the support” from playing alongside Murray at the All England Club.

“Hopefully I can still have it,” she added.

“I think to play on this stage with Andy, who has done so well here for so many years, is literally just a lifetime experience. I’m so happy that I got to experience it.”

• Serena was making me laugh out there – Andy Murray column
• Live scores, schedule and results
• Alerts: Get tennis news sent to your phone

‘Mur-rena’ out but plenty of positives for Sir Andy

Three-time Grand Slam winner Murray has spoken of his pleasure at being back playing competitively after having a hip resurfacing operation from which no player has returned to singles action.

Few would have thought they would see the 2013 and 2016 champion playing Wimbledon so soon and, despite seeing the chance of another title alongside Williams disappear, he will look back on the past month with plenty of positives.

Murray made a winning return by taking the Queen’s doubles alongside Spain’s Feliciano Lopez and has continued to look sharp for this stage of his recovery at the All England Club.

The partnership with Williams, christened by the pair as ‘Mur-rena’, has wowed the Wimbledon crowds but they could not recover after dropping their first set of the tournament against Soares and Melichar.

Dogged defending from Williams at the net ended in a volleyed winner on the way to a break point at 3-3, but the pair could not convert and were punished in the next game when Soares and Melichar broke for 5-3 and served out the first set.

A tight second set swung the way of Murray and Williams after Soares produced three double faults on what proved to be the final game.

The Brazilian, who used to partner Murray’s brother Jamie in the men’s doubles, made amends by sealing a break in the first game of the decider with a forehand winner placed in-between his opponents.

That proved key as the top seeds began to run away with the set, taking their first match point to reach the quarter-finals when Murray drilled a forehand into the net.

Murray and Williams continued to smile, however, as they left a packed court two to a standing ovation.

In his latest BBC Sport column, Andy Murray discusses his blossoming partnership with Serena Williams in the mixed doubles and not playing against older brother Jamie at Wimbledon.

Playing alongside Serena at Wimbledon has been great fun so far and, as I joked after our first match, we are both younger siblings – so we are very competitive.

We want to have a few more days and matches playing together, hopefully until the final on Sunday.

I wouldn’t say anything has particularly surprised me about Serena as a player or a person, even though I didn’t know her particularly well before we played and we have not spent loads of time together.

But you expect someone who has been as successful as she has to be extremely competitive – and she is.

Even though it is mixed doubles, and her priority is singles, she goes out there and wants to win every point.

Her record speaks for itself and the more matches she plays, her performances and level will only increase.

We played better in our second-round match against 14th seeds Fabrice Martin and Raquel Atawo than we did in the first round, and I’m sure we will continue to improve as we get more matches under our belts.

We have put pressure on our opponents in all four of the sets we have played and created a lot of break-point chances, and I think as the matches go on we will get better at converting them.

What I think has worked particularly well so far is our returning games. Some of Serena’s returning – especially in our second match – was brilliant.

Martin is a really tall guy and was serving huge, but she put a lot of returns in play on the first serve and then she took big cuts at the returns on the second serve and was making a lot of them.

That is not an easy thing to do and she won’t have been used to returning serves of that size. And if you think how little she has been playing, the way she is picking that up is special. It’s not something everyone can do.

‘Wimbledon has been more relaxed this year’

Only playing in the doubles at Wimbledon is obviously different to playing in the singles and it has been a new experience for me. The tournament has been more relaxed.

I’ve enjoyed Wimbledon every time I’ve had the opportunity to play – it is just a little bit more stressful when you’re playing singles. When it is doubles you are sharing that load together, which helps.

One of the things that is tough to get used to on court in mixed doubles is the difference between the man’s serve and the woman’s serve.

Martin’s serve was getting up to 138mph and the ball is bouncing up around your head on the return. But when the woman is serving, it is a 30mph or 35mph difference and the ball is staying probably a metre to a metre and a half lower. That can be more challenging to keep the rhythm there.

However, the format is good fun and the crowd love to watch it.

You only see the mixed at the Slams really, but is a different format and one a lot of social tennis players play at local clubs around the country.

Serena and I shared a few jokes out there on Tuesday night – but we can’t reveal what they were, unfortunately, because some of the language was not repeatable!

I was feeling more relaxed than the first match and that was probably because Serena was making me laugh out there, and hitting some amazing returns.

We are playing again on Wednesday and I’m looking forward to that. The crowds have been brilliant so far and, hopefully, we can put on another good display.

No tinge of disappointment that Jamie and I won’t meet

Jamie losing in the mixed doubles earlier on Tuesday means we won’t play against each other here at Wimbledon.

It is a shame he did not do as well in the men’s doubles with Neal Skupski as he would have liked, and it is a shame I didn’t either after losing in the second round with Pierre-Hugues Herbert.

But it is everyone else who talks about us playing each other. It’s not like we are sitting there and texting each other, saying we could play each other in the third round of the men’s, or the final of the mixed.

That is not how sport works. Wimbledon is one of the toughest tennis tournament in the world and the best players are here, so it’s hard and we both know that.

Just because it is a good story for me to play against my brother it does not mean we are automatically gifted a passage through the draw.

Andy Murray was talking to BBC Sport’s Jonathan Jurejko at Wimbledon.

• Live scores, schedule and results
• Alerts: Get tennis news sent to your phone

Johanna Konta reacted angrily when questioned on her big-point mentality after another golden Grand Slam opportunity went begging.

The British number one lost 7-6 (7-5) 6-1) to unseeded Barbora Strycova in the Wimbledon quarter-finals.

She hit a huge 33 unforced errors in a match in which she was the overwhelming favourite, mirroring a similar showing in the French Open semis.

“I don’t think you need to pick on me in a harsh way,” she told one reporter.

Presented with examples of shots that had gone wrong, such as a smash at the net and a double fault, and asked if she perhaps could have coped better on big points, she replied: “Is that in your professional tennis opinion?” before saying the questioning was “disrespectful and patronising”.

“I’m a professional competitor who did her best today, and that’s all there is to that,” she added.

Konta had put in battling performances against top-10 players in her two previous matches, coming through in three sets against Sloane Stephens and Petra Kvitova, and has much to celebrate from these championships.

On the back of a successful clay-court season as well, she is set to return to the top 15 in the rankings for the first time since March 2018.

She has won admiration for a calmer on-court demeanour since hiring new coach Dimitri Zavialoff late last year, but the manner of her defeat from a winning position on Tuesday and the spiky nature of the news conference afterwards are reminiscent of the old days.

After last year’s first-round exit from the French Open, she accused journalists of making her job more difficult with their criticism.

The mantra versus the mistakes

Konta is well known for speaking about the positives in her losses, even if it sometimes looks a bit of an effort to say it and look upbeat at the same time.

After this defeat, when she had led 4-1 before crumbling and missing out on a fourth Grand Slam semi-final, she repeated the same “no regrets” mantra that came after the defeat by unseeded Marketa Vondrousova at the French Open last month.

That straight-set loss to the teenager – which came after the Briton had held three set points in the first set – stopped her reaching her first Grand Slam final, with many pundits saying that had been her best chance of a major title.

Against Strycova, former world number one John McEnroe said it was disappointing to see Konta “fall to pieces” when she had been a break up early on.

But Konta, whose forehand broke down when targeted by Strycova, gave much of the credit to the Czech for “playing very well” rather than explaining why her serve that was so dominant in previous rounds dropped to a level where she won just 51% of first-serve points.

Nor did she explain why she sent two forehands long and a backhand wide to allow Strycova to break back in the first set, when as former world number one Tracy Austin put it on BBC television, “the irritating streaks of her game started kicking in”.

“I think I’ve played a great tournament,” Konta said. “Obviously I would have liked to have played three more matches, won three more matches. But I really feel that even including today, I can take a lot away from these 10 days.

“The players that I’ve played and beaten, also lost to today, I think overall there’s a lot I can be proud of and take from it.”

• Live scores, schedule and results
• Alerts: Get tennis news sent to your phone

Was the news conference questioning unfair?

Former Wimbledon champion Marion Bartoli said Konta had been “bullied” by the questioning at the news conference, while journalists would say they are just doing their jobs by asking what went wrong in a match.

“[News conferences] can be extremely difficult,” Bartoli told the BBC’s Today at Wimbledon. “It is part of your job, you just have to sort of say exactly what she said – I am a professional tennis player, I tried my best today.

“Obviously us as analysers, we’re trying just to figure it out what happened exactly, why she lost that match and why the other one won it.

“But as a tennis player you just can’t allow yourself to be bullied like this in a press conference from someone who probably never picked up a racquet himself and never been on Centre Court, to be frank.”

Konta ‘will have to work on her game’

Konta reached her first Grand Slam semi-final at the Australian Open in 2016, losing to Angelique Kerber, while her bid to reach the Wimbledon final in 2017 was halted in the last four by seven-time Grand Slam champion Venus Williams.

A slump followed and she split with coach Wim Fissette after that Wimbledon semi-final before hiring Maria Sharapova’s former coach Michael Joyce at the start of the 2018 season.

But she reached just one final last year, losing to Ashleigh Barty in Nottingham, and her ranking dropped to as low as 50th.

Under Zavialoff she has turned things round, reaching two clay finals this year before the stunning run at the French Open – a tournament where she had previously never gone beyond the first round.

She continued her form on grass with some excellent displays at the All England Club but once again finds herself facing questions about how she can take the next step up and end the 42-year wait for a British women’s singles Grand Slam champion.

“I think now if she wants to improve and actually go further in a Grand Slam and maybe to first of all be in a final, she will have to sit down with her coach and see what happened today in that match,” Bartoli said.

“She will have to work on her game because I think those kind of players with the slices and the lack of speed are really disturbing her, so that is something she will have to work on.”

What was said – full transcript of exchange

Journalist: Do you not have to look at yourself a little bit about how you cope with these big points? Because it’s all very well saying it is a lot to do with your opponent but there were key points when you perhaps could have done better.

Konta: Is that in your professional tennis opinion?

Journalist: No, that is just as a watching spectator with everyone else on Centre Court willing you on.

Konta: OK. I don’t think you need to pick on me in a harsh way. I think I’m very open with you guys and I say how I feel out there and if you don’t want to accept that answer or you don’t agree with it then that’s fine. But I still believe in the tennis I play and still believe in the way I competed and I don’t much have else to say to your question.

Journalist: I’m just asking you as someone who presumably wants to go on from here, learn from this and win a Grand Slam one day. Is it not something that you need…

Konta: Please don’t patronise me…

Journalist: …I’m not patronising you…

Konta: …No, no you are. In the way you are asking your question you are being quite disrespectful and you are patronising me. I am a professional competitor who did her best today and that’s all there is to that.