Australian Open
“I could have won. I could have been up 5-Love,” said Williams, who instead took a 2-0 lead at the outset before dropping the next five games. “I just made so many errors.”
Her forehand, in particular, went awry, with no fewer than 10 unforced errors off that side in the first set alone.
“Too many mistakes there,” she said. “Easy mistakes.”
Williams’ frustration was made plain early in the second set, when she leaned over and screamed, “Make a shot! Make a shot!”
After collecting her professional era-record 23rd Slam singles trophy at Melbourne Park while pregnant in 2017, Williams reached four major finals and lost them all.
She’s also now lost in the semifinals twice in that span.
So on Saturday, Osaka will meet first-time Grand Slam finalist Jennifer Brady for the championship. The No. 22seeded American defeated No.
25 Karolina Muchova 6-4, 3-6, 6-4 in today’s second semifinal.
Brady saved a trio of break points and converted her fifth match point when Muchova sent a forehand long to end it.
In a late semifinal, men’s No. 1 Novak Djokovic was to face Russian qualifier Aslan Karatsev.
Williams’ loss came less than 24 hours after another Grand Slam great was eliminated at Melbourne Park — on Wednesday night, Rafael
Nadal blew a two-set lead and lost to Stefanos Tsitsipas 3-6, 2-6, 7-6 (4), 6-4, 7-5.
No. 2 Nadal entered his Australian Open quarterfinal with a 223-1 record when grabbing the first two sets of a Grand Slam match. A couple of uncharacteristically sloppy overheads and a framed backhand in a third-set tiebreaker began Nadal’s undoing, and his bid here for a men’s-record 21st major championship eventually ended.
“Was little bit of everything, no? I missed a couple of balls in the tiebreak that I shouldn’t
— that I could not — miss if I want to win. And that’s it,” said Nadal, who briefly left the Spanish portion of his postmatch news conference after clutching at his cramping right hamstring.
“I have to go back home,” Nadal said, “and practice to be better.”
At his put-the-ball-wherehe-wants-it best in the early going, Nadal went ahead rather easily, winning 27 consecutive points on his serve in one stretch and running his streak of consecutive sets won at major tournaments to 35, one shy of Roger Federer’s record for the professional era.
But Tsitsipas never wavered and that surprisingly poor tiebreaker by Nadal helped hand over the third set and begin the epic comeback.
“I started very nervous, I won’t lie,” the fifth-seeded Tsitsipas said. “But I don’t know what happened after the third set. I just flied like a little bird. Everything was working for me. The emotions at the very end are indescribable.”