Australian Open action resumes

MELBOURNE, Australia — Most things about this week leading into a major are different for Serena Williams.

The 23-time Grand Slam champion got to try something new Friday, too, needing a match tiebreaker to beat fellow American Danielle Collins 6-2, 4-6, 10-6 and set up a semifinal against top-ranked Ash Barty in the Yarra River Classic.

“I felt good to get through that in a tiebreaker,” Williams said. “Definitely different.”

Even more different is that Williams doesn’t usually play the week before a major.

That’s been the theme for this Australian Open, which was delayed three weeks so that all players and their entourages could spend 14 days in hotel quarantine under the strict regulations in place for the COVID-19 pandemic.

A day after all matches in six tournaments were postponed so that 160 players could isolate and undergo testing because a worker at a quarantine hotel returned a positive test, there were 70 matches on the order of play as organizers tried to cram all scheduled lead-in matches into three days. The Australian Open starts Monday.

Barty also got her first taste of the modified scoring system introduced to shorten matches in a disrupted schedule, dominating a match tiebreaker to beat Shelby Rogers 7-5, 2-6, 10-4.

In a reverse of the result of last year’s Australian Open final, Garbine Muguruza beat Sofia Kenin 6-2, 6-2 to advance to the semifinals.

Kenin beat Muguruza in the 2020 final in three sets, including by 6-2 scores in the final two sets.