By Richard Pagliaro | @Tennis_Now | Sunday, January 21, 2024
Elated Aussie followers erupted in a wall of sound as house hero Alex de Minaur squared off in opposition to Andrey Rublev for a dramatic fifth set on Rod Laver Arena
A ruthless Rublev battered boundaries, silenced followers and unleashed a significant celebration of his personal.
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World No. 5 Rublev rolled by seven straight video games keeping off Australian No. 1 de Minaur 6-4, 6-7(5), 6-7(4), 6-3, 6-0 in a 4 hour, 14-minute Australian Open fourth-round conflict that left de Minaur feeling “devastated.”
The explosive Rublev denied de Minaur’s bid to turn into simply the third Aussie man within the final 20 years—after Davis Cup captain Lleyton Hewitt in 2005 and Nick Kyrgios in 2015—to achieve the AO quarterfinals.
“Maybe a couple years ago or even last year I would be sitting here, maybe even happy with the result, saying, I probably shouldn’t have won, he’s higher ranked than I am, I took him to five sets, pretty decent effort,” mentioned de Minaur afterward. “But it’s completely changed because now I’m sitting here and I’m absolutely devastated because I saw it as a great opportunity and a match that I strongly believed I could have won. But it just slipped away.”
Former junior world No. 1 Rublev rocketed by eight straight factors to start out the deciding set and by no means regarded again.
It is Rublev’s three hundredth Tour-level match victory as he snapped a five-match shedding streak vs. Top 10 opponents.
Rublev superior to his third AO quarterfinal and Tenth Grand Slam quarterfinal.
The hard-hitting Rublev seeks to shatter an ignominious 0-9 lifetime main quarterfinal mark when he faces No. 4-seeded fellow red-head Jannik Sinner for a semifinal spot.
The Tenth-ranked de Minaur, who tuned up for the Australian Open beautiful world No. 1 Novak Djokovic on the United Cup, mentioned this defeat will sting for some time. De Minaur hit extra winners (45 to 39), received extra web factors (26 to 16) and earned extra break factors (16 to 13) than Rublev solely to see the Russian rip his AO desires to shreds with a dominant fifth set efficiency.
“It’s tough because I thought he was hurting physically in the third and in the fourth. He just let go,” de Minaur mentioned. “He started swinging. The balls went in.
“It’s not a match that I assumed I misplaced bodily. It was simply that the racquet was taken out of my hand. Got to a stage the place I simply couldn’t get him transferring or expose that motion.
“He was just standing and hitting from every single part of the court at just mach 10. That’s probably the most disappointing part of the whole match.”
Photo credit score: Julian Finney/Getty
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