Gael Monfils, of France, serves to Marcos Baghdatis, of Cyprus, during the fourth round of the U.S. Open tennis tournament, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016, in NY.
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The world no. 1 made light work of Kyle Edmund with a 6-2 6-1 6-4 fourth-round win to end Edmund’s remarkable run at the competition. “I had a high intensity”. It’s not easy to do that when you have to wait all day to play. He added, to the fans: “You make me so happy everyday”.
“It has been a good tournament for me but there obviously still a lot of stuff I can improve on but there are loads are positives”. The baseline shots, both the forehand and the backhand were working well.
“But I need something else, I need something more that was not there today”.
Injury meant that Dominic Thiem retired early in the Austrian’s clash with Juan Martin Del Potro that was at *3-2 to Thiem in set one before he lost four straight games and retired early in set two, so we got no luck in that one.
The 27-year-old Tsurenko had never been past the third round at a major before this tournament.
Edmund, whose match starts around 02:00 BST on Monday, said: “I’ll look to play aggressively as that’s my game”.
The Serb has a 15-6 winning record against ninth seed Tsonga, a run stretching back to their first meeting in the 2008 Australian Open final.
In Tuesday’s other men’s quarter-final, Lucas Pouille, who knocked out 14-time major victor Rafael Nadal in five sets on Sunday, faces French compatriot Gael Monfils.
Edmund levelled the set with a hold of serve to love and he broke Djokovic again to win his third game in a row.
“Well, depends at how you look at it”, he began.
But then he called for the trainer for treatment on his troublesome right elbow and from that moment on, Edmund was back in business.
Sevastova broke Konta seven times in 11 service games. Suddenly there was a sense that it could become an uncomfortable night for the Serb.
Of some concern was that the state of Djokovic’s right arm.
To be fair, Kerber and 14th-seeded Kvitova were handed a tough act to follow with the capacity Arthur Ashe Stadium crowd left buzzing about Frenchman Lucas Pouille’s upset win over Rafael Nadal in a five-set thriller that had an hour earlier closed out the day session. “It was good. Everything was fine”, he later told a media conference. Later, when a reporter asked why he asked for the medical visit, Djokovic said with a smile, “I needed a little bit of a massage”. When he sets it up very nicely, he can hit a very good forehand from all over the court.
His left wrist had been bothering him since early August, so Djokovic arrived in NY without much recent match play, having lost in the first round of the Rio Olympics and pulled out of a hard-court tuneup tournament. “Other than that, everything was great”.
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“So coming into the second week of a grand slam quarter-finals feeling good, it’s exactly where I want to be”. Nobody has beaten Djokovic more times than Nadal – even though it hasn’t happened in over two years – and the pair was slated to meet at the semifinal at the Open.
