Dominic Thiem continued his dream run at the French Open 2016 as he put up a solid performance against David Goffin to storm into the last-four stage of the tournament here on Thursday.
Austria’s Thiem, seeded just one place below the 12th-seeded Goffin, came through tough two opening sets to pull off a hard-fought 4-6, 7-6, 6-4, 6-1 to advance to his maiden Grand Slam semi-final.
The match began with both players looking feeble on serve. The opening set witnessed as many as five breaks, but it was Goffin who drew the first blood by breaking Thiem’s serve at 5-4 to take an early lead.
The second set was no better in terms of quality of serve as the duo looked strong on return, instead. Having broken each other twice, the set was taken to tie-breaker, where Thiem prevailed 9-7 to make it one set all.
In their quest to take a commanding lead, both Thiem and Goffin were locked up a 4-4 in the third set, before the former rose up to the occasion to take a crucial lead, winning it 6-4.
Riding on the momentum, the 22-year-old Austrian dashed his way to a 5-0 lead in the fourth set before closing it out 6-1 to extend his winning streak to nine matches (won tournament in Nice before the French Open).
Reflecting on the challenge that he faced from Goffin in the early parts of the match, Thiem said: “Honestly in the whole second set I didn’t really think that I’m going to win this match, because, yeah, he was just on top of me.
“He was the better player the first two sets maybe, or until the tie-break. I didn’t know what to do because he was returning well. He didn’t do any mistakes. Then I think the tiebreak was one of the highest level I was ever playing. Then things kind of turned around.
“But, yeah, I doubted when I would go 2-0 sets down that I would have won the match,” he admitted later in the press conference.
Moving on to the last-four stage, the 11th-seeded Thiem has been slated to lock horns with World No. 1 Novak Djokovic of Serbia, who moved past Tomas Berdych in the other quarter-final battle.
