Happy, zero – Newspaper Kommersant No. 11 (7456) of 01/23/2023

Confidently beating the Japanese Yoshihito Nishioka, Karen Khachanov reached the quarterfinals of the Australian Open for the first time in his career. The next opponent of the Russian will be the young American Sebastian Korda, who is holding his best Major. Meanwhile, at the women’s tournament, the first racket of the world, Iga Swiatek from Poland, lost in straight sets to the current Wimbledon champion Elena Rybakina from Kazakhstan.

If a week ago Karen Khachanov’s hypothetical entry into the quarterfinals of the Australian Open looked almost like a sensation, then on Sunday this result was taken for granted. The fact is that the opponent of the Russian in the fourth round was not last year’s champion Rafael Nadal, but the 33rd racket of the world, Yoshihito Nishioka. And it would be an unaffordable luxury for Khachanov to miss a great opportunity to go so far in the Melbourne Major bracket for the first time.

Nishioka is, of course, a rare master. There are only two such small runners with a height of no higher than 170 cm in the top hundred now – the Argentinean Diego Schwartzman, who was in the top ten two years ago, and his compatriot Sebastian Baez, but the Japanese, unlike them, is also left-handed. Of course, it is not easy to fight the giants with such limited physical capabilities, but Nishioka tries to use his chances to the maximum. For example, in his first match of this season in Adelaide, he beat perhaps the most progressive player of recent months – the Dane Holger Rune, and last year he came across two more top ten players under the hot left hand – Andrey Rublev and Kasper Ruud. All of them can run around the back line like clockwork, but they did not cope with the Japanese hard worker.

On the way to the 1/8 finals, Nishioka spent only six and a half hours on the Melbourne courts – two hours less than Khachanov. It seemed that the Russians would not be easy, but in reality it turned out differently.

If in the first two games what was happening on the court could still be called a struggle, then the Japanese had a failure, rare for matches of this level. In the next nine games, he took only six points, as a result of which Khachanov won two sets “dry” for the first time since the small professional tournament in 2014 in Togo, which, of course, no one managed to do at the current Australian Open in the men’s bracket.

“In the first two sets, I just didn’t know what was going on,” the newly minted quarter-finalist later admitted, who, fortunately, did not relax and managed to keep his concentration, because the third set turned out to be completely different. Nishioka finally forced himself to get involved in the fight, and in the third game, having won a 31-stroke rally, he even took the serve of the Russian, who also had to win back two break points in the ninth game.

There was a tie-break at the very end, and there, until the score was 4:4, the Japanese also looked great, but the last three points remained with Khachanov.

Having made 15 aces and lost only three draws on his first serve, he proceeded to the quarterfinals in about two hours, where he will deal with the recent offender of Daniil Medvedev – in front of the maturing Sebastian Korda, who was also on a tie-break, but figured it out in the fifth set with the Pole Hubert Hurkacz. Despite the huge superiority of the Russian in experience, by and large it will be a match of equal opponents. This is evidenced by the score of personal meetings – 2:1 in favor of Korda, who two years ago in a stubborn struggle with a score of 7:9 in the fifth game lost to Khachanov at Wimbledon, but last year in Cincinnati and Antwerp he beat him twice.

In the other quarter-final in the upper half of the bracket, 21-year-old Czech Jiří Legechka, who had not previously had a single win in the main draws at majors, and in Melbourne in the fourth round dealt with the seventh racket of the world Canadian Felix Auger-Aliassime, will meet with Stefanos Tsitsipas. Perhaps, in the fight for reaching the final, which is very close, the Greek in the upper half of the bracket looks like a favorite.

Meanwhile, the women’s Australian Open was left without a world ranking leader. This happened following a meeting with the participation of the current winners of the Grand Slam tournaments.

The champion of Roland Garros and US Open, the first racket of the world, Iga Shventek, lost in two sets to Elena Rybakina from Kazakhstan, who won Wimbledon last year.

Moreover, another tennis player from the top ten also stumbled – Wimbledon finalist American Coco Gauff, who was defeated by Elena Ostapenko from Latvia. The 25-year-old from Riga, who won the 2017 Roland Garros to her credit, reached the quarterfinals of the major for the first time in five years.

Evgeny Fedyakov