Aided by top seed Garbiñe Muguruza’s withdrawal earlier in the day, onetime world No. 1 Victoria Azarenka eased past lucky loser Anna Blinkova 6-1, 6-0 to reach the final eight in the American west.
Azarenka played a steady match on her racket and took full advantage of horrendous serving from Blinkova: She didn’t hold serve once and won barely a third of points on her racket. The Russian double faulted six times, while Azarenka hit an understated 14 winners in just 57 minutes of play.
Disappointingly for the tournament, the featured evening match turned into a 6-1, 6-0 blowout for the second consecutive night. Importantly for Azarenka, however, she rebounded from her first round victory, a two-plus hour slog in which she rarely displayed her best form, with a dominating performance against a 19-year-old opponent added to the draw hours before the match.
“I actually prepared to play against (Muguruza). I was really looking forward to that,” Azarenka said on-court. “I’m obviously disappointed for her because it’s never easy to see another player getting hurt.
“I didn’t know my opponent today and I was actually just thinking about it, I was really impressed with her attitude,” she added. “The score was really one-sided but she tried to fight for every point.”
Elsewhere, Johanna Konta backed up her shocking rout of Serena Williams on Tuesday with a straightforward 6-1, 6-4 win over Sofia Kenin. The win gave Konta, ranked 48th in the world, her first premier-level quarterfinal since January, and it continued a run of strong play in the Bay Area for the 2016 champion.
Konta consistently outpaced her American opponent, winning 72 percent of first serve points, hitting nine aces and saving the only two break points she faced. Konta had 20 winners to 13 unforced errors, in contrast to Kenin’s underwater mark of 16 winners and 19 contrasting errors.
The 19-year-old, however, lost the match primarily on second serves. She won a relatively unsurprising 39 percent of points on her second serve, while Konta took 17 of 24 points on hers.
Konta held off a late charge from a rapidly improving Kenin in the final stages of the second set, setting up a last eight clash with No. 4 seed Elise Mertens.
The Belgian needed only 64 minutes to dispatch American wild card Ashley Kratzer 6-2, 6-0 in her first match in San Jose. Mertens won an impenetrable 88 percent of first serve points and faced 10 break points while winning 17 of 22 points on Kratzer’s second serve.
Azarenka, meanwhile, will play Danielle Collins, who outlasted Vera Lapko 6-1, 3-6, 6-1 in a section now without any seeded players. Two crowd favorites who received first round byes, Madison Keys and Venus Williams, will begin play on Thursday.
