Jannik Sinner powered past Alexei Popyrin in straight sets on Wednesday to reach the last eight of the Qatar Open and edge closer to a possible final meeting with Carlos Alcaraz.<\/p>\n
The Italian, playing his first tournament since losing to Novak Djokovic<\/a> in the Australian Open semi-finals last month, eased to a 6-3, 7-5 second-round win in Doha<\/a>.<\/p>\n Sinner<\/a> will play Jakub Mensik<\/a> in Thursday’s quarter-finals.<\/p>\n The world number two has now won his last 50 matches against players ranked outside the top 50, a run dating back to a loss to Dusan Lajovic<\/a> in Cincinnati in 2023.<\/p>\n “I respect every player, but I always try to play my best tennis,” Sinner said when told of that streak.<\/p>\n “The ranking, at the end of the day, is just a number. Everyone is playing (with) high quality.<\/p>\n “Especially when the opponents don’t have much to lose, you always have to stay very focused.”<\/p>\n Australian world number 53 Popyrin<\/a> battled gamely but failed to create a break-point opportunity against his clinical opponent.<\/p>\n Sinner dropped just three points on serve in an excellent first set, which he took courtesy of a break in the sixth game.<\/p>\n Popyrin fought hard in the second but could not force a tie-break as Sinner broke to grab a 6-5 lead before confidently serving out the set.<\/p>\n World number one Alcaraz<\/a> takes on Frenchman Valentin Royer<\/a> in his second-round match later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jannik Sinner powered past Alexei Popyrin in straight sets on Wednesday to reach the last eight of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":491055,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,85,747],"class_list":["post-491054","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\/491054","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=491054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491054\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/491055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}