While Paul owned two early wins from seven previous encounters, he knew better than to hope the top seed\u2019s concentration would waver.<\/p>\n
Having fallen in their two Grand Slam showdowns he knew it was a steep hill to climb if he fell behind two sets, so he made a bold attempt to mix it up with an injection of more pace.<\/p>\n
Maintaining control in prolonged rallies was another matter and after being broken early he was unable to recover the deficit.<\/p>\n
With a two-set lead after an hour and 46 minutes, the wind was in the Spaniard\u2019s sails. It would have been easy for Paul\u2019s level to fade.<\/p>\n
Instead, he found his best in a tightly contested third set and hung tough until 5-all before a string of loose errors cost him his serve and ultimately the contest.<\/p>\n
Alcaraz marched on to a last-eight clash against sixth-seeded Australian Alex de Minaur or 10th-seeded Kazakhstani Alexander Bublik.<\/p>\n
There will be plenty to more to recap in the family chat should he reach a maiden Australian Open semifinal. Distractions, on court at least, will be kept to a minimum.<\/p>\n
\u201cSomething that I was working on is to maintain the focus in the whole match, which I did today, playing such great tennis since the beginning until the end of the match,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo for me it was really, really important more than saving energy, because I just have plenty of (energy). It’s more about how I have been playing during almost three hours, which was really high.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While Paul owned two early wins from seven previous encounters, he knew better than to hope the top…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":437533,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,85,747],"class_list":["post-437532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=437532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437532\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/437533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=437532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=437532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=437532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}