Former world number one Naomi Osaka broke new ground as she raced into the Wimbledon fourth round for the first time with victory over Daria Kasatkina.<\/p>\n
All four of Osaka’s Grand Slam singles titles have been won on hard courts, and she has struggled to play her natural, big-hitting game on the French Open clay and All England Club grass-courts.<\/p>\n
But the Japanese 14th seed – who arrived on Court One in yet another showstopping outfit – looked at home at SW19 as she thrashed Kasatkina 6-1 6-3 in just 65 minutes.<\/p>\n
The dominant display comes less than five weeks after Osaka reached the last 16 of Roland Garros for the first time.<\/p>\n
Osaka could face top seed Aryna Sabalenka in a blockbuster clash next if the Belarusian beats Latvia’s Jelena Ostapenko later on Friday.<\/p>\n
“I definitely felt really good today. I’ve played a lot of matches on grass for the past two weeks, so I felt really confident,” the 28-year-old said.<\/p>\n
Osaka made her first grass-court final at the Bad Homburg Open last month, although on that occasion she was forced to retire injured at the start of the second set against Karolina Muchova.<\/p>\n
However, it seems that run in Germany has given Osaka a much-needed boost of confidence on the surface, and she has yet to drop a set at Wimbledon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former world number one Naomi Osaka broke new ground as she raced into the Wimbledon fourth round for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":741081,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-741080","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\/741080","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=741080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741080\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/741081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=741080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=741080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=741080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}