Dayana Yastremska and Qinwen Zheng will face each other this Thursday morning, January 25, 2024, starting at 12 am, in a match valid for the semifinal stage of the Grand Slam of the Australian Open. The duel will be played at the Rod Laver Arena, in the city of Melbourne, Australia.
Dayana Yastremska
Ukrainian Dayana Yastremska entered this edition of the Australian Open ranked number 93 in the world, but she has already secured precious points to take a big leap forward in her career amid the excellent performance recorded in this Grand Slam so far.
Adding an incredible eight consecutive victories, the Ukrainian has been piling up victims since the tournament qualifications and didn’t even concede sets in the two previous matches, which were theoretically also the most complicated.
This is because Yastremska faced Victoria Azarenka and even though she came into action with the status of a big underdog on betting sites, she managed to surprise everyone with a relatively quiet victory by 2 sets to 0, despite the duel being quite exhausting after 2 hours and 10 minutes long.
In her most recent match, Dayana Yastremska faced Linda Noskova, from the Czech Republic, and despite being seen as an underdog, she once again performed at a high level to win by 2 sets to 0, this time with splits of 6/3 and 6/4 in exactly 1 hour and 20 minutes of duel.
Against Zheng, the Ukrainian appears once again as an underdog in her odds and is preparing to shock the world if she manages to reach the grand final of the Australian Open.
Her trajectory so far includes triumphs against Boskovic, Joint, Grammatikopoulou, Vondousova, Gracheva, Navarro, Azarenka and Noskova, with an incredible eight wins in a row.
Qinwen Zheng
While young Qinwen Zheng has already made history by becoming the youngest Chinese tennis player to reach the semi-finals of a Grand Slam, at just 21 years and 108 days old, surpassing the record held by Jie Zheng, set at Wimbledon in 2008, when he was 24 years and 362 days old.
However, Zheng wants to go even further in the competition and aims to confirm his broad prior favoritism to also reach the tournament’s grand final.
The Chinese entered the Australian Open as 15th in the rankings, however, after defeating Kalinskaya in the quarterfinals, she reached 10th place, reaching the peak of her career until then.
Her career was marked by five consecutive victories and her most recent match was a 2 sets to 1 victory against Anna Kalinskaya, with scores of 6/7 6/3 and 6/1 in 2 hours and 18 minutes of confrontation.
In this edition of the Australian Open, Qinwen Zheng scored triumphs over Krueger, Boulter, Wang, Dodin and also Kalinskaya.
Conclusion:
The two athletes presented incredible performances to get here and regardless of the winner, the tendency is for us to have a very balanced duel, with very close splits. Therefore, I see good value in Yastremska’s positive handicap, which has been surprising everyone and is fully capable of meeting the proposed handicap.