Carlos Alcaraz on Sunday produced his best display of the tournament to line up a quarter-final rematch with Stefanos Tsitsipas at the French Open, while Iga Swiatek ramped up her bid for a third successive Roland Garros title with a 40-minute blitz.
Alcaraz has said he feels much more like himself in Paris after an injury-hit build-up saw him sidelined with a sore forearm for almost a month.
His 6-3, 6-3, 6-1 win over Canadian 21st seed Felix Auger-Aliassime suggested he is rounding into top form, sending an ominous signal to his rivals as he made the last eight for the third year in a row.
Photo: AFP
The Spaniard pumped 34 winners past Auger-Aliassime as the persistent rain which heavily disrupted the first week of the tournament finally relented, allowing matches on the two main courts to go ahead without the need for their retractable roofs.
“I’m really happy with my performance. I think I played a really high level of tennis,” said Alcaraz, who was beaten by eventual champion Novak Djokovic in the semi-finals last year.
“The most important thing is to believe in myself. It doesn’t matter that I don’t have too many matches on my back and that I didn’t come with a lot of rhythm,” Alcaraz said.
“My game is getting better and better,” he said. “My confidence is getting higher. Every practice that I’m doing or every day that I’m here in Roland Garros, I’m feeling better and better.”
Alcaraz moves on to play Tsitsipas after the 2021 Roland Garros runner-up fended off Italy’s Matteo Arnaldi 3-6, 7-6 (7/4), 6-2, 6-2, the turning point coming in the second set when he saved four set points.
“It was one of the craziest comebacks I’ve had,” ninth seed Tsitsipas said. “That game when I broke [down 5-3 in the second set] was the biggest pleasure I’ve experienced in tennis for a long time.”
Alcaraz boasts a 5-0 career head-to-head record over Tsitsipas with three wins on clay, including a straight-sets victory in the French Open quarter-finals a year ago.
“He has said in the past he likes playing against me, so I hope he gets to like it a little bit less this time,” Tsitsipas said.
Earlier in the day, women’s world No. 1 Swiatek demolished Russia’s Anastasia Potapova 6-0, 6-0, conceding only 10 points in the shortest completed match of her career.
“I was really focused and in the zone. I wasn’t looking at the score so I continued working on my game,” Swiatek said. “It went pretty quickly ... pretty weird.”
Swiatek, who saved a match point against Naomi Osaka in the second round, is a red-hot favorite to lift the Coupe Suzanne Lenglen and become only the fourth woman to win four Roland Garros titles in the Open era.
In the second round of the women’s doubles, Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova took 56 minutes to thrash Russia’s Elena Vesnina and Anna Kalinskaya 6-1, 6-3.
Chan was less fortunate in her second-round mixed doubles match with partner Hugo Nys from Monaco. New Zealand’s Michael Venus and Erin Routliffe beat them 6-4, 6-3.
Although the world No. 1 pairing of Hsieh Su-wei from Taiwan and Elise Mertens from Belgium were stunned 6-2, 6-4 in the women’s doubles by the US’ Emma Navarro and Russia’s Diana Shnaider, Hsieh and her mixed doubles partner Jan Zielinski of Poland beat the Czech Republic’s Katerina Siniakova and Tomas Machac 6-2, 7-6 (7/3).
Additional reporting by staff writer
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