Top half of women's draw wide open at Australian Open

All four quarterfinalists from the top half of the women's draw are into the last eight at Melbourne Park for the first time, with No. 12-seeded Zheng Qinwen the highest-ranked player in the group.

Zheng matched her career-best run — she reached the U.S. Open quarterfinals last year — by breezing to a 6-0, 6-3 win in under an hour against Oceane Dodin in the last night match.

She'll next play Anna Kalinskaya, who beat No. 26 Jasmine Paolini 6-4, 6-2. In 13 previous majors, Kalinskaya had never got past the second round.

Zheng received a surprise visit from 2014 Australian Open winner Li Na, China's first major winner, after the third round and took some advice: “Focus on the moment. Li Na said, ‘Just play, don’t think too much. Keep it simple.’”

While the highly-ranked players continue to advance in the men’s draw, the seeded players keep toppling out on the women's side. And that has opened opportunities for Dayana Yastremska and Linda Noskova to advance to the quarterfinals of a Grand Slam for the first time.

Yastremska beat the 18th-seeded Victoria Azarenka 7-6 (6), 6-4, a two-time Australian Open champion, and No. 23-seeded Elina Svitolina had to retire after hurting her back when she was trailing Noskova 3-0.

Azarenka served for the first set twice and had two set points at 6-5 but couldn’t convert them. Yastremska was down a break in the second but rallied to win six of the last seven games.

“I think I need to take a thousand breaths because my heart I think is going to jump out of my body,” Yastremska said. "During the match, I was imagining how I lost already like 25 times. I was losing the tiebreak, second set I was losing, I always felt I was running behind the train.

“But because I’m a little bit of a fighter I think I won this match.” There was no handshake, as is the convention between Ukrainian players and opponents from Russia and Belarus.

The first game of the Noskova-Svitolina match lasted 11 minutes and contained 20 points. Noskova broke serve and held for 2-0 before Svitolina had a timeout and received treatment on her lower back.

When she resumed, the Ukrainian’s serve speed was well down and her movement appeared compromised. After being broken for a second time and holding back tears, Svitolina shook Noskova’s hand and retired.

“I got a spasm, like a shooting pain,” she said. “Couldn’t do anything, completely locked my back, just very sad. I had some injuries to my back before where it just was tiredness ... but this one was really out of nowhere. I felt like someone shot me in the back.”

The 19-year-old Noskova beat top-ranked Iga Swiatek in the third round and now is the youngest player to reach the Australian Open women’s singles quarterfinals since 2008.

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Simon Cambers contributed from Melbourne.

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AP tennis: https://apnews.com/hub/tennis