Novak Djokovic has crashed Alex de Minaur’s celebration to ship the final dwelling hope packing from the Australian Open with a ruthless fourth-round show on Rod Laver Arena.
Showing no indicators of the hamstring harm that had troubled him throughout the first three rounds, Djokovic delivered a centre-court masterclass to completely outclass de Minaur 6-2 6-1 6-2 in two hours and 6 minutes on Monday evening.
The emphatic defeat not solely abruptly ended de Minaur’s pipe dream of breaking Australia’s 47-year males’s singles title drought in Melbourne but additionally served as one other sobering grand slam actuality verify for the one-time US Open quarter-finalist.
Try as he would possibly, the light-weight baseliner merely couldn’t compete with Djokovic’s firepower as the previous world No.1 clubbed 26 winners to 9 and broke de Minaur six instances to ebook a quarter-final date on Wednesday with fifth seed Andrey Rublev.
Moving extra freely and rising in confidence, Djokovic might be a scorching favorite in opposition to the Russian as he continues his pursuit of a mind-boggling tenth Open title after heaping but extra ache on Australians on the majors.
The tremendous Serb broke Nick Kyrgios’ coronary heart in final yr’s Wimbledon closing and has now improved his win-loss report over Aussies on the slams – together with Lleyton Hewitt, Bernard Tomic and John Millman – to 12-1.
His lone grand slam defeat to an Australian got here in opposition to de Minaur’s mentor Hewitt greater than 16 years in the past in New York when Djokovic was nonetheless a youngster.
De Minaur began brightly sufficient, holding his opening service recreation to like and shutting it out with a assured ace.
But it didn’t take lengthy for Djokovic to claim his authority, breaking the twenty second seed twice to take the primary set in quickfire style, earlier than grabbing three extra breaks within the second to blow the match open.
There was no let up within the third set because the fourth seed’s weight of shot left de Minaur’s error-rate hovering.
The 23-year-old finally submitted in only two hours, successful solely 5 video games in his heaviest loss but from 22 grand slam appearances.
