Williams needs three sets to advance
She reaches Aussie quarterfinals in latest bid for 24th major title. Osaka rallies to defeat Muguruza.
MELBOURNE, Australia — Serena Williams has returned to the Australian Open quarterfinals by getting past No. 7 seed Aryna Sabalenka in three sets.
The 6-4, 2-6, 6-4 victory Saturday put Williams, seeded 10th, one step closer to her record-tying 24th Grand Slam title overall and eighth title at Melbourne Park. Her most recent major trophy came at the Australian Open in 2017.
This was Williams’ 62nd fourth-round match at a major tournament — and Sabalenka’s second.
The 39-year-old American next faces either Simona Halep or Iga Swiatek.
In another fourth-round match Naomi Osaka was one point from the end of her lengthy winning streak, one point from leaving the Australian Open with a loss to Garbine Muguruza.
Bleak as things looked for her late in a big-hitting matchup of Grand Slam champions and former No. 1ranked women, Osaka never wavered, erasing two match points and grabbing the last four games to edge Muguruza 4-6, 6-4, 7-5.
The third-seeded Osaka returns to the quarterfinals of a tournament she won in 2019 for one of her three major trophies. Osaka ran her winning streak to 18 matches — a run that included a U.S. Open title in September — and put a stop to Muguruza’s own fine form of late.
Heading into Sunday — the second day of the tournament without any spectators,
because of a local COVID-19 lockdown — twotime major champion Muguruza had been broken only once in this Australian Open. She had dropped a total of 10 games through three matches.
But Osaka broke her five times and won 17 games in all in a contest featuring entertaining baseline play and terrific serving by both on a cloudy day with the temperature in the mid-60s.
“I was a bit intimidated, because I knew that she was playing really well coming into this match,” Osaka said. “In the stressful points, I feel like I just had to go within myself. And I know that today I probably hit a lot of unforced errors, but I feel like it was what I needed to do, because I couldn’t really give her any short balls because she would finish it.”
The key moment came when Osaka was serving at 15-40 while trailing 5-3 in the final set. Muguruza could not convert either of those match points: Osaka delivered one of her 11 aces at 118 mph on the first; Muguruza missed a groundstroke on the second.
Fifteen minutes later, the match would be over.
Osaka, a 23-year-old who was born in Japan and moved to the U.S. with her family when she was 3, now faces unseeded 35-year-old
Hsieh Su-wei of Taiwan.
“I’m not really looking forward to it,” Osaka said. “She’s going to be really tough.”
The 71st-ranked Hsieh’s 6-4, 6-2 victory over 2019 French Open finalist Marketa Vondrousova made her the oldest woman to make her major quarterfinal debut in the professional era.