Like Jovic, Belarusian Sabalenka is yet to drop a set at this year’s Australian Open.<\/p>\n
She has now reached at least the quarter-finals in 13 consecutive Grand Slam appearances and is two wins away from a fourth successive final in Melbourne.<\/p>\n
The champion in 2023 and 2024, she lost last year’s final to American Madison Keys.<\/p>\n
The 27-year-old appeared to be cruising towards a comfortable victory against 17th seed Mboko, leading by a set and a double break.<\/p>\n
However, she almost let a 4-1 lead slip in the second set and eventually clinched victory in a tie-break – the 20th in a row she has won in a Slam, beating Novak Djokovic’s previous record.<\/p>\n
“She’s an amazing player, it was quite a fight and I’m super happy that I was able to close this match in straight sets,” said Sabalenka.<\/p>\n
“The second set was a bit tricky but I’m happy with the level I played and happy to be through.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Like Jovic, Belarusian Sabalenka is yet to drop a set at this year’s Australian Open. She has now…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":428723,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-428722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=428722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428722\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/428723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}