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MELBOURNE, 22 Jan: Wimbledon champion Carlos Alcaraz will meet Olympic gold medalist Alexander Zverev in the Australian Open quarterfinals and Daniil Medvedev is also back in a last eight that is stacked with the top six seeds.<\/p>\n
While the men\u2019s competition is playing fairly true to the rankings, the women\u2019s really is a tale of two halves.<\/p>\n
No. 12-seeded Zheng Qinwen, a quarterfinalist at last year\u2019s U.S. Open, is the highest-ranked player left in the top half of the bracket, where all four women who won Monday reached the last eight at Melbourne Park for the first time.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe people who arrive to quarterfinals, for sure they\u2019re all feeling really well in this tournament,\u201d Zheng said after her 6-0, 6-3 win over No. 95 Oceane Dodin. \u201cIt\u2019s one player against another player, and we will compete.\u201d<\/p>\n
She\u2019ll next play No. 75-ranked Anna Kalinskaya. No. 50 Linda Noskova, who beat top-ranked Iga Swiatek in the third round, will meet No. 93 Dayana Yastremska.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s still three Grand Slam winners in the other half of the bracket. No. 2 Aryna Sabalenka, the defending champion, will take on 2021 French Open champion Barbora Krejcikova and U.S. Open winner Coco Gauff will play Marta Kostyuk in quarterfinals on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
The first of the men\u2019s quarterfinals \u2014 10-time Australian Open champion Novak Djokovic vs. No. 12 Taylor Fritz and No. 4 Jannik Sinner vs. No. 5 Andrey Rublev \u2014 were set on Sunday, well before Alcaraz completed a Grand Slam set by reaching the last eight in Australia for the first time.<\/p>\n
The 20-year-old Alcaraz missed the 2023 Australian Open because of injury, but is making up for lost time.<\/p>\n
He beat Miomir Kecmanovic 6-4, 6-4, 6-0 in less than two hours to open Monday\u2019s night session on Rod Laver Arena.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery match I\u2019m playing, I\u2019m feeling better and better on a court I didn\u2019t play so much,\u201d Alcaraz, the only man to beat Djokovic in a major last year, said of his buildup here. \u201cHopefully the same as Wimbledon. Yeah, could be the same.\u201d<\/p>\n
He has dropped just one set. Zverev is into the quarterfinals here for the third time but is coming off some long five-set wins, including a four-hour, 7-5, 3-6, 6-3, 4-6, 7-6 (3) fourth-round victory over No. 19 Cameron Norrie.<\/p>\n
It was the 32nd five-set match so far at the tournament, an Open era record in Australia.<\/p>\n
Their match on Margaret Court Arena was prolonged after being delayed briefly when a protester threw anti-war pamphlets onto the back of the court in the third set. The protester was escorted out by security.<\/p>\n
No. 3 Medvedev, a two-time Australian Open runner-up, beat No. 69-ranked Nuno Borges 6-3, 7-6 (4), 5-7, 6-1 and will next face No. 9 Hubert Hurkacz, who ended the run of French wild-card entry Arthur Cazaux 7-6 (6), 7-6 (3), 6-4.<\/p>\n
Some unexpected charges continue in the women\u2019s field, with opportunities opening up for the likes of Noskova, Yastremska and Kalinskaya to advance to the quarterfinals of a Grand Slam for the first time.<\/p>\n
Kalinskaya beat No. 26 Jasmine Paolini 6-4, 6-2 to end a streak of 13 majors that didn\u2019t go beyond the second round.<\/p>\n
Yastremska beat the 18th-seeded Victoria Azarenka, a two-time Australian Open champion, 7-6 (6), 6-4, and No. 23-seeded Elina Svitolina had to retire after hurting her back when she was trailing Noskova 3-0.<\/p>\n
\u201cI got a spasm, like a shooting pain,\u201d she said. \u201cCouldn\u2019t do anything, completely locked my back, just very sad. I had some injuries to my back before where it just was tiredness … but this one was really out of nowhere. I felt like someone shot me in the back.\u201d<\/p>\n
The 19-year-old Noskova now is the youngest player to reach the Australian Open women\u2019s quarterfinals since 2008.<\/p>\n
Yastremska saved set points in the first against Azarenka and was down a break in the second but rallied to win six of the last seven games.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think I need to take a thousand breaths because my heart I think is going to jump out of my body,\u201d Yastremska said. \u201cDuring the match, I was imagining how I lost already like 25 times. I was losing the tiebreak, second set I was losing, I always felt I was running behind the train.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut because I\u2019m a little bit of a fighter I think I won this match.\u201d (AP)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
MELBOURNE, 22 Jan: Wimbledon champion Carlos Alcaraz will meet Olympic gold medalist Alexander Zverev in the Australian Open quarterfinals and Daniil Medvedev is also back in a last eight that is stacked with the top six seeds. While the men\u2019s competition is playing fairly true to the rankings, the women\u2019s really is a tale of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-232971","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232971\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}