Novak Djokovic, the U.S. Open’s No. 1 seed, finally got to play a complete match, beating Britain’s Kyle Edmund, 6-2, 6-2, 6-4, in a match that ended just after midnight Monday.
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“Considering I had some struggles before the tournament, I feel great at this moment physically”.
But it was the way that after two sets of one-way traffic, of being pushed around and bullied by the best player around, Edmund made a fight of it in the third set that made the loss easy to deal with.
As he lined up in the tunnel, Djokovic said he had “missed tennis” during his week of walkovers, and the 29-year-old certainly stormed out of the blocks, breaking Edmund twice before serving out the opening set. Djokovic had his elbow massaged at a changeover; a trainer worked on his right arm in the first round.
World number one Novak Djokovic cruised through to the quarter-finals of the US Open as he looks to win back-to-back titles in NY.
The Serbian eased past World No.84 Edmund, with a straight sets 6-2 6-1 6-4 victory at Flushing Meadow. Overall, Djokovic is still the favorite to win this tournament.
Yesterday’s results: Del Potro bt Thiem 6-3 3-2 (Thiem retired); Wawrinka bt Marchenko 6-4 6-1 6-7 6-3. Afterwards, she acknowledged that wrestling the No. 1 ranking away from Williams is important.
Kvitova, the Rio Olympic bronze medallist, offered more resistance in the second before meekly surrendering with a double fault on match point to gift Kerber a place in the quarter-finals.
The match lasted four hours and seven minutes and it was decided by a fifth set tie-breaker.
The tennis ace will next play No. 9-ranked Jo-Wilfried Tsonga on Tuesday. The trio that time was Jean Borotra, Jacques Brugnon and Rene Lacoste, all members of France’s famed “Four Musketeers” group of tennis stars in the 1920s and 1930s. “It was tough but I came off a lot happier than I was during the match because I started to impose myself in the third set”. But Pouille, a 22-year-old with flashy strokes, presented a much sterner challenge in the fourth round, pushing Nadal to the limit over 4 hours, 7 minutes of tense – and intense – exchanges.
Although everyone noticed that Djokovic is calling his physiotherapist during his match, he noted that everything’s fine and good.
Edmund threatened to turn the match around when he broke for 3-2, but then the Djokovic intensity kicked in once again.
Djokovic’s victory put him into the last eight against ninth-seeded Frenchman Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, a 6-3 6-3 6-7 (7) 6-2 victor against American 26th seed Jack Sock. She next faces seventh-seeded Roberta Vinci, who previous year eliminated Williams from the U.S. Open.
Unusually for Djokovic, he faced a lot of question marks coming into this US Open, more than he has had to answer at the start of a major for a long time, and the stark truth is that not all of them have been answered yet.
Edmund did seem a little overwhelmed at times on Sunday.
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Once he had, however, 2008 Australian Open runner-up Tsonga reasserted himself, powering to a 5-2, 40-0 lead.
