It’s ladies’ quarter-finals day at Wimbledon – but one men’s last-16 match needs to be completed too.
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He will have to wait until Tuesday to see which man he will face as their all-Czech match was suspended in the fading light at 9:21 p.m. after Vesely took it to a fifth set shootout, winning a 71 minute fourth set on the tiebreak.
Vesnina will play World No 1 and defending champion Serena Williams in Thursday’s semifinals after the American defeated the other Russian in the last eight, Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, 6-4 6-4.
An early break in the third set was all the incentive Berdych needed to seal his drama-free progress to the last four.
He is also taking heart from his performances against Murray in NY and Melbourne, where he won the opening set both times.
Pouille, 22, lost in the first round on his Wimbledon debut a year ago and has lost in the first round in seven of his previous nine Grand Slam appearances. I (will) try to recover as good as possible for Wednesday.
“We’ve had a lot of great matches, she and I. We haven’t played in a while”, Williams said.
If Tomic can get past Pouille, the 19th seed is guaranteed a Czech quarter-final opponent – either 2010 runner-up and world No.10 Tomas Berdych or the unseeded Jiri Veseley. He had never before won a five-set match at tour level and had never beaten a seeded player at a grand slam.
“The decisions are made by people who are sitting at the chair”.
“I can’t really see”. But mostly it’s the fact that that was the first time when I showed myself that I can play well for two weeks. I don’t know why actually we have to play in those situations when a very accurate machine is not able to operate.
“I get a chance to play, I get a chance to play on Centre Court, so it can’t be better than that”.
The third set was much of the same, whilst Pouille held serve in the first game, Berdych would go on to win five games in a row before serving out the match at 5-2 to move his first Grand Slam semi-final since the Australian Open in 2015. I think that’s all the experience that I already have.
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“Once you get to this part of a tournament, motivation is going to kick in after a few games of every match”, said Venus’ coach, David Witt, “and you’re going to stop thinking about being sore, if you’re sore”.
