Melbourne, Australia) – One of the sensations of this Australian Open so far, the Czech Jiri Lehecka arrived for the tournament without a Grand Slam victory, but on his fifth attempt the 21-year-old tennis player and current world number 71 decided not only to get his first triumph, but started a series of four, the most recent of them this Sunday against the Canadian Felix Auger-Aliassime.

As he did in the previous round with Britain’s Cameron Norrie, the young Czech sought another comeback beating the current world number 7 with the final score of 4/6, 6/3, 7/6 (7- 2) and 7/6 (7-3), after 3h17 of confrontation. It was Lehecka’s first top-10 victory, also needing five tries to finally get a positive result.

JOY FOR JIRI 🙌

before that #AusOpen, @jirilehecka had never won a Grand Slam main draw match.

Now the world number 71 is in the #AO2023 quarter-finals! 👏@wwos • @ESPN • @Eurosport • @wowowtennis pic.twitter.com/CLXZQO7ZfF

— #AusOpen (@AusOpen) January 22, 2023

Lehecka has become the seventh tennis player from his country to reach the quarter-finals of the Australian Open and now he will have to overcome the duel between Greek Stefanos Tsitsipas and Italian Jannik Sinner. He has never faced Sinner on the tour, but he came across Tsitsipas once and had the worst in the Rotterdam semi-final last year.

Even the 20 aces and 70% service advantage wasn’t enough for Aliassime to claim victory as Lehecka was even better and won 77% of the service points. The two were tied for game winners, with 39 each side, but in unforced errors the Czech committed 12 less (33 to 45).

The four sets of the match have been defined in detail. In the first and second, a solitary break was enough, with Aliassime leading and Lehecka equalizing at 1-1. victory.

The elimination of Aliassime ends the campaign of tennis players who were the main characters of the series netflix. The Canadian was the only one yet to fall but he also failed to go much further and joined the list which also includes Nick Kyrgios, Thanasi Kokkinakis, Matteo Berrettini, Taylor Fritz, Casper Ruud, Ajla Tomljanovic , Maria Sakkari, Paula Badosa and Ons Jabeur.