Tennis - Wimbledon - All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, London, Britain - July 9, 2023 Jessica Pegula of the U.S. in action during her fourth round match against Ukraine's Lesia Tsurenko REUTERS/Toby Melville
LONDON (Reuters) -Jessica Pegula enjoyed one of those scarcely believable days straight out of fantasy land as her racket oozed winners left, right and centre in a 6-1 6-3 fourth-round destruction of luckless Ukrainian Lesia Tsurenko at Wimbledon on Sunday.
It was a performance that will live long in Pegula's memory after she reached the Wimbledon quarter-finals for the first time by unleashing 22 winners and breaking her anguished rival five times.
"That was great... I came out playing really well, exactly how I wanted to play and I was just trying to ride that momentum as well as I could," Pegula said in a courtside interview after becoming only the fifth American woman in the last 25 years to reach the last eight at all four majors.
For Tsurenko, the day was anything but great.
The 34-year-old was left slapping her thighs and talking animatedly into her racket but no matter what she tried, it seemed like her game had slipped into a terminal coma.
Pegula took full advantage of her opponent's woes as she walloped thunderous winners from the baseline to streak into a 5-0 lead in 18 blinding minutes.
Perhaps still feeling the effects of the mammoth effort she put into overcoming Ana Bogdan in the previous round, when Tsurenko won the longest women’s singles tiebreak (20-18 in the third set) at a slam in the Open Era, the Ukrainian could do little to stop the on-fire Pegula's charge.
Tsurenko was lucky not to be completely wiped out from the opening set as the American fourth seed missed a set point in the sixth game.
That blip allowed Tsurenko to finally get a look-in as she registered her name on the scoreboard, earning her a round of sympathetic applause from the Court One crowd.
That respite, however, was brief as Pegula went on another three-game winning spree to take a 6-1 2-0 lead.
The mounting errors from Tsurenko left her trailing 5-1 in the second set too and while she managed to break Pegula when the American was serving for a place in the quarter-finals two games later, it seemed her body had faced enough punishment for the day.
After saving two match points, Tsurenko winced in pain on the baseline and wasted little time in removing her right shoe and sock, revealing a bloody underfoot blister.
The on-court intervention from the trainer only delayed the inevitable as two points later Pegula was celebrating with a clenched fist as she booked a last-eight showdown with Marketa Vondrousova.
With her name now in the mix with Venus and Serena Williams, along with Madison Keys and Sloane Stephens, Pegula said: "It's amazing to be in that group with these people... I am so glad to make the final eight and I hope I get my name on a wall, or something."
(Reporting by Pritha Sarkar, editing by Clare Fallon)
