WHAT HAPPENED: World No. 1 and defending US Open champion Jannik Sinner humbled Alexander Bublik to storm into the quarterfinals, setting up a showdown with fellow Italian Lorenzo Musetti.
Sinner completed the 6-1, 6-1, 6-1 triumph in just 81 minutes against his overwhelmed opponent, who committed 13 double faults—the last one on match point—among 31 unforced errors.
Bublik loomed as a dangerous opponent for Sinner, as one of only two men—the other being Carlos Alcaraz—to defeat the Italian in the past 52 weeks. He rode an 11-match winning streak after recent clay-court titles in Gstaad and Kitzbuhel and had won 20 of his past 22 matches since the start of Roland Garros, where he reached the quarterfinals.
He’d also held every service game he’d played at the 2025 US Open—a 55-game streak Sinner snapped in the very first game of the match. Sinner broke Bublik again en route to a 3-0 lead, looking extremely sharp in his first appearance under the Arthur Ashe Stadium lights this year.
Bublik tried everything, including drop shots and underhand serves, to counter the Sinner onslaught. But nothing worked, and the world No. 1 had the first set in his pocket after 23 minutes.
Perhaps feeling the effects of his late-finishing five-set win over Tommy Paul in the third round, Bublik could not find his normally devastating serve. He double-faulted to drop serve in the second game of set two—one of six he would commit during the second frame—while Sinner’s serve was firing, with a fifth ace ensuring a two-sets-to-love lead.
Bublik pulled off some electric shotmaking in the third set to ignite the crowd, and avoided a third set bagel when, at 0-4, 15-40, benefitting from a slight dip in Sinner’s concentration to escape with a hold, then generate his first break point of the match.
Yet the defending champion erased that break chance with an unreturnable serve, then broke Bublik for the eighth time in the match to progress.
By surrendering only three games, it equals the most dominant win of Sinner’s Grand Slam career—and it was not dissimilar to their match in Paris, where Sinner ended Bublik’s quarterfinal run with a 6-1, 7-5, 6-0 triumph.
WHAT IT MEANS: Sinner certainly appears back on course after his third-round wobble against Denis Shapovalov, who stretched the Italian to four hard-fought sets in a match spanning more than three hours. The opening set against the Canadian is the only one Sinner has lost this tournament.
That match unfolded in warmer daytime temperatures at Flushing Meadows, whereas on Monday night, the cooler, relatively still evening conditions inside Ashe suited Sinner perfectly.
The win keeps alive his quest for a fourth straight Grand Slam title on hard courts and his third major crown of the season.
MATCH POINT: Sinner has now reached at least the quarterfinals at eight consecutive Grand Slam tournaments. The last time he was defeated before that stage was at the 2023 US Open, when he fell in the fourth round to Alexander Zverev.
