Anna Kalinskaya reached the quarterfinals of the Australian Open

The ninth day of the Australian Open, which continues in Melbourne, brought another surprise in the women’s singles. 25-year-old Russian Anna Kalinskaya, who had never reached the third round at a Grand Slam tournament before, sensationally reached the quarterfinals, and on Monday she confidently beat Italian Jasmine Paolini in two games. For men, two-time (2021, 2022) Australian Open finalist Daniil Medvedev made it to the top eight, defeating Portuguese Nuno Borges in four sets.

Having started to get into the main draws of adult Grand Slam tournaments five years ago, Anna Kalinskaya won only one memorable victory at them until this season, beating American Sloane Stephens, at that time the tenth racket of the world, at the US Open in 2018. The Russian’s technically pure play was often pleasing to the eye, but injuries too often hampered her, and Kalinskaya also lacked physical strength, without which it is now difficult to achieve much in women’s tennis. To successfully perform at majors, tennis players of this kind definitely need a good coach who will be able to reveal the strengths of his player, leveling out her shortcomings, a lot of patience and at least a little luck. And now Kalinskaya finally has this entire winning set at her disposal. Arriving in Melbourne with her coach, the famous tennis player of the 1990s, Argentine Patricia Tarabini, who has been working with the Russian in the USA for about five years, she finally waited in the wings.

Analyzing the sensational quarterfinal performance of Kalinskaya, the finalist of the 2015 French Open among girls, who had never previously managed to get past at least the first round at the Australian Open, Roland Garros and Wimbledon, of course, we cannot discount the factor of luck.

Anna Blinkova’s unexpected victory over Elena Rybakina in the second round radically changed the balance of power in this part of the grid. True, Kalinskaya herself, who at the end of last season returned to the top hundred of the world classification and is now in 75th place there, has also done a lot. Having started the tournament with a difficult three-set match against the American Katie Volynets, who made her way into the main draw through qualification, she dealt with two rivals who are ranked higher – the Dutch Arancha Rus and her old friend Sloane Stephens.

Fourth round meeting with the 31st racket of the world, Jasmine Paolini, was imagined as a confrontation between two tennis players of different classes, but it turned out differently. The Italian made mistakes, couldn’t cope with Kalinskaya’s well-calibrated attacks, and at the beginning of the second game she didn’t even manage to break someone else’s serve with three break points in a row. As a result, Kalinskaya, for whom Paolini’s suffering only added confidence, scored her fastest victory at the current tournament – 6:4, 6:2 in 1 hour 17 minutes. And now she will rise sharply in the rankings, where in a week for the first time in her career she will be no lower than the mid-40s. There is, however, another, even more successful option. But to climb into the third ten, the Russian woman needs to beat a fairly strong Chinese tennis player Zheng Qingwen, who last season won two Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) tournaments, was in the quarterfinals of the US Open, and is now the 15th racket in the world.

Kalinskaya’s game took place on the third most important court of the Australian Open, and before that on its main arena, named after Rod Laver, a similar but long-familiar task of reaching the quarterfinals decided Daniil Medvedev.

The Portuguese Nuno Borges, who fell to him in the fourth round, is a new man at this stage of the Grand Slam tournaments. Coming through the American collegiate tennis system, he was a relatively latecomer to the professional level, but last year he won three “challengers” (tournaments of a lower category compared to the ATP Tour) and established himself in the top 100 of the world rankings. It’s interesting that throughout history, only one player from Portugal has reached the 1/8 finals of a major in men’s or women’s singles – Joao Sousa, who did it at the US Open in 2018 and at Wimbledon in 2019. That is, Borges’ success in this match would be considered a great sensation, and in order for it to be born, he needed to do something extraordinary.

However, in the Portuguese’s tennis there are no such features that could be used to completely ruin the game of such giants as Medvedev. Borjes has a good sense of the ball, allowing him to successfully use shortened shots, and high stability on the back line, due to which he unexpectedly beat the Bulgarian Grigor Dimitrov in the third round. But by and large, this late-discovered master is just a typical average player, of which there are dozens in the top 100. So Medvedev quite logically won the first set, then in the tie-break he reserved the second game, in the middle of which the opponents exchanged games on their serve. Things were heading towards a confident victory for the Russian when, with the score 5:2 in the third game, he, according to him, felt tired due to the running that Borzes forced him to do. This is a bad period for Medvedev. He made frequent double faults and, having missed a match point in the tenth game, gave the set to his opponent. The extra half hour spent on the Rod Laver court did not prevent the Russian from returning to the quarterfinals of the Australian Open two years later, but it will no longer be possible to give away seven games in a row there. Pole Hubert Hurkacz, who defeated the young but promising Frenchman Arthur Cazeau, is an extremely difficult opponent for Medvedev and has defeated him three times in five previous matches.

Evgeniy Fedyakov