De Minaur, who was hoping to make it to his first Grand Slam semi-final at the seventh time of asking, had not beaten world number one Alcaraz in five previous attempts.<\/p>\n
In a tight opening set, De Minaur thrilled the crowd with aggressive hitting as he tried to match the world number one’s speed and intensity.<\/p>\n
He twice clawed his way back from a break down before the top seed struck the decisive blow at 6-5 after almost an hour on court.<\/p>\n
Former Wimbledon winner Pat Cash said the first set showcased “some of the highest level tennis I’ve ever seen”.<\/p>\n
“It was two players refusing to back down, they were hitting balls from two or three feet behind the baseline,” Cash told BBC Radio 5 Sports Extra.<\/p>\n
“It was like a video game, pinging backwards and forwards. It was so quick; there were drop shots, defensive lobs, chase backs, there was everything. An unbelievable set of tennis.”<\/p>\n
But the gap in quality soon became evident as Alcaraz raised his level and De Minaur struggled to land any punches on the six-time major winner’s serve.<\/p>\n
“As soon as we started asking can he [De Minaur] keep the level up, the wheels fell off and Alcaraz didn’t retreat,” Cash added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"De Minaur, who was hoping to make it to his first Grand Slam semi-final at the seventh time…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":393303,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-393302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393302\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/393303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}