Australian Open futures: What to expect in the quarterfinals and beyond
Four rounds up, four rounds down. Welcome to the business end of the Australian Open.
The field has thinned considerably to just eight men and eight women. Most of them are familiar faces we expected to see here — Djokovic, Gauff, Sabalenka, Sinner, etc. But there are a few surprises in there. Iga Swiatek is missing, as is Frances Tiafoe. Their ignominious early exits left the door open for a whole host of fascinating left field challengers.
As the fourth round wraps and the quarterfinals begin, let’s take a look at some of the biggest themes from the Australian Open thus far — and consider how they might impact what comes next.
New rivalries igniting. Novak Djokovic and Ben Shelton didn’t play each other during this Open, but that didn’t stop the media from pitting them against one another after their fiery finish to last year’s U.S. Open. (Shelton exited in the third round to Frenchman Adrian Mannarino, who Djokovic went on to smoke 6-0, 6-0, 6-3 in perhaps the most complete performance of the tournament so far.) The fourth round, meanwhile, was colored by Taylor Fritz and Stefanos Tsitsipas, two men who have only played six times but enter each match with the vigor and bile of long-standing enemies. (We have, of course, christened their rivalry Fritzipas.)
What new rivalries might we encounter at the business end of the tournament? We’ve got our eyes on two of the strongest competitors left: Aryna Sabalenka and Coco Gauff. If the two keep performing at the level they’ve shown thus far, they’ll meet in the semifinals on Wednesday. If you missed out on backing Sabalenka or Gauff before the tournament started, you might want to make your pick now: with Iga Swiatek out of the picture, these two look like the only people in each other’s way. Sabalenka is at +150 to win outright; Gauff is at +175.
Endless tiebreaks. We’ve seen dozens of wild, will-they-or-won’t-they tiebreaks at the Open this year, from Alex de Minaur snatching two sets from Andrey Rublev last night to teenage Mirra Andreeva powering through a near-impossible third set monster against Diane Parry. But no tiebreak captured the imagination quite like Elena Rybakina and Anna Blinkova’s 42-point slog — the longest singles tiebreak in AO history.
If you’re looking for more tiebreaks in the immediate AO future, look no further than the men’s quarterfinal between the aforementioned Rublev and Jannik Sinner. These two are an interesting pair — their styles are more closely matched than anyone in the quarters — and we think they may throw up some more fascinating tiebreaks for us to enjoy. At +350 for >1.5 tiebreaks in the match, if this trend is going to continue anywhere, we think it’s here.
Bagels. We saw some utterly dominant early-round performances at this Open, from Tsitsipas’s destruction of Luca Van Assche to Gauff’s clinic against fellow American Alycia Parks. But it was Djokovic’s steely, unrelenting takedown of Adrian Mannarino that left us all shaking our heads in awe. 18 games to 3? In the fourth round? Incredible.
If anyone is going to pull off more 6-0 wins in the future, it’s going to be Djokovic. And while we don’t exactly think it’s likely that he’ll destroy Fritz in the quarters like he destroyed Mannarino, we do think Fritz has been starting slowly all tournament and might find himself in a difficult position after the first set. He’s at +2800 to pull it off, +1000 to win 6-1, and +650 to win 6-2. Given what we’ve seen from Djokovic so far, we wouldn’t blame you for backing him here.
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