Musetti, the No. 5 seed at Melbourne Park, led Djokovic 6-4, 6-3, 1-2 when he took a medical timeout for treatment on his upper right leg.<\/p>\n
He played on for another game, only to walk to the net and shake hands with Djokovic moments later, down 1-3 in the third set.<\/p>\n
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Djokovic will continue his bid for an 11th Australian title and a record 25th major but he says he was lucky this time.<\/p>\n
“I don’t know what to say except that I feel really sorry for him,” the 38-year-old Djokovic said in an on-court interview. “He was the far better player — I was on my way home tonight.”<\/p>\n
“These kinds of things happen in sport. It happened to me a few times,” he added, but “he should have been a winner today, no doubt.”<\/p>\n
Djokovic took an early break and was a point away from a 3-0 lead in the first set before Musetti responded and took control of the match.<\/p>\n
The situation appeared to get more dire for Djokovic when he needed a medical timeout after the second set for a serious blister on the ball of his right foot. He wasn’t moving his best, either.<\/p>\n
“Blister here and there, nothing major bothering me, I just wasn’t really feeling the ball today,” Djokovic said.<\/p>\n
“He was the far better player,” Novak Djokovic said of Lorenzo Musetti (above), who was leading their quarterfinal match 6-4, 6-3, 1-3 when he retired with an injury. “I was on my way home tonight.”\u00a0Darrian Traynor\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
It’s the second time in as many matches that Djokovic, who had reached the quarterfinals without dropping a set, advanced because of an injured opponent. Just a few days ago, he received a walkover into the quarterfinals when Jakub Mensik<\/a> withdrew 24 hours ahead of their scheduled fourth-round match with an abdominal injury.<\/p>\n Djokovic will play the winner of Wednesday’s later quarterfinal between No. 8 Ben Shelton<\/a> and two-time defending Australian Open champion Jannik Sinner<\/a>.<\/p>\n ESPN’s Jake Michaels and The Associated Press contributed to this report. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jan 28, 2026, 02:06 AM ET MELBOURNE, Australia — Novak Djokovic advanced to the Australian Open semifinals for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":434594,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-434593","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\/434593","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=434593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434593\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/434594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=434593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=434593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}