The 29-year-old booked his spot in the Roland Garros semi-finals with a hard-fought, four-set victory over Frenchman Richard Gasquet on Wednesday and will now face defending champion Stan Wawrinka for a place in the final.
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The world number two was made to work for his win, however, losing the first set and being taken to a tie-breaker in the second on the way to a 5-7 7-6 (3) 6-0 6-2 victory in three hours 23 minutes.
“It was very important for me to win the second set, it would have been very tough for me to come back if I’d have lost it”, said Murray.
Third seed Wawrinka, who won the tournament previous year and the Australian Open in 2014, still feels his career is inferior to Murray’s despite matching the Scot’s tally of two Grand Slam titles.
He has now reached 19 Grand Slam semi-finals in total, which among active players is bettered only by Federer, Djokovic and Nadal. The organizers of French open pushed Djokovic’s last-16 match against Roberto Bautista Agut in the top of the list this morning. While you’d like to see the errors drop a bit, Wawrinka is clearly still hitting his spots and is very risky when he’s combining his winners with an effective service game.
After labouring through the first game, Wawrinka crushed Ramos Vinolas to take the first two sets in less than an hour.
In the women’s section, Defending champion Serena Williams brushed off concerns about a busy playing schedule after powering into quarterfinals.
According to the scorecards, eight players will complete their fourth-round matches today.
The 22-year-old came back from a set point down in the first set to end the dream run of the 108th ranked American Shelby Rogers 7-5, 6-3.
I like Murray to advance to his first career French Open final.
“[Stan] is obviously playing great tennis”, Murray said. That stretch of five or six points was huge from 3-1 [in the tie-break]. But I think he can also deal with these conditions quite well, so let’s see if it’s going to play to be advantage or disadvantage, which I don’t know right now. “It’s totally fine I think for me and for everyone”. Third-seeded Swiss, who got off to a slow start in opening rounds of the claycourt Grand Slam, steamrollered through the first two sets and resisted in the third on Court Suzanne Lenglen.
Belgian 12th seed David Goffin tackles close friend and 13th seeded Austrian Dominic Thiem with the victor reaching the semi-finals at a major for the first time.
The pair began their match just after midday on Tuesday, already a day late, and finally completed it at 1.47pm on Wednesday, with Djokovic winning 3-6 6-4 6-1 7-5.
Swiss eighth seed Bacsinszky ended any prospect of Serena facing sister Venus in the semi-finals after dumping out the elder Williams in straight sets, 6-2, 6-4.
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In the quarterfinals, Serena will face either No. 12 Carla Suarez Navarro of Spain or unseeded Yulia Putintseva of Kazakhstan.
