Amanda Anisimova arrives in New York having produced the best stretch of her career so far in 2025. The 24-year-old American reached her first Grand Slam final at Wimbledon earlier this summer, beating world No 1 Aryna Sabalenka in the semi-final, and collected her first WTA 1000 title at the Qatar Open in February.

Anisimova is into the US Open quarter-final for the first time and faces Iga Swiatek, a rematch that comes weeks after the American failed to win a single game versus the Pole at the All England Club. Beyond the immediate task of getting past a six-time major champion, this fortnight presents a major ranking opportunity.

This season Anisimova has climbed steadily. After returning to the tour in 2024 she broke into the top 20 following her victory over Jelena Ostapenko in the Doha final. A fourth-round showing at Roland Garros moved her into the top 15 and her run to a maiden major final at Wimbledon pushed her into the top 10. She reached a career-high of world No 7 after Wimbledon but entered the US Open at No 9.

Thanks to results in New York, she is guaranteed to be ranked at least seventh in the world after the tournament. Current world No 7 Zheng Qinwen is absent due to injury, while No 8 Jasmine Paolini was beaten in round three, opening the door for movement in the top ten.

A direct WTA Live Rankings battle with compatriot and world No 4 Jessica Pegula is unfolding. Pegula, who has 1,300 ranking points to defend as the 2024 runner-up, sits provisionally at world No 6 on 4,383 points, with Anisimova on 4,289. A victory over Swiatek would move Anisimova to 4,639 points and ahead of Pegula and Madison Keys, who holds 4,579. With Keys out in the first round, that would guarantee Anisimova a minimum ranking of world No 6 next Monday.

A further run to the final would lift her to 5,159 points, overtaking Mirra Andreeva on 4,793 and delivering a first top-five ranking. Only Pegula, by winning the title and hypothetically beating her in the final, could prevent that outcome.

It will not be easy to beat Swiatek, but Anisimova’s season suggests the possibility of another breakthrough in New York.

This US Open delivered an unusually heavy load of five-setters, and the consequences were plain. Three players, Flavio Cobolli, Kamil Majchrzak, and Daniel Altmaier, retired on Saturday after winning marathons on Thursday. Tommy Paul seemed to run out of gas after playing his second wee-hour five-setter in a row. The player who beat him, Alexander Bublik, then experienced a similar collapse against Jannik Sinner.

The long-running argument over whether men should keep best-of-five at the majors continues. As one observer put it when hearing best-of-five called “the ultimate test in tennis,” the response is often, “So why don’t the women get to take the same test?”

Still, many regard five-set Slams as sacrosanct. They have produced epic, defining moments and have not, historically, shortened careers or led to an obvious rash of retirements. Yet the modern game is more physical, equipment is more advanced, and prolonged baseline warfare can turn best-of-five into four-hour battles of attrition. Even winners can be so spent that they are compromised for the next match.

One proposal to ease the load while preserving the format is to adopt no-ad scoring. Eliminating deuce games caps the maximum points in a game at seven and thus limits the maximum number of points in a set. Shorter matches mean less cumulative wear and tear. The strategy and winner-take-all aspect of the no-ad point would add another element of suspense to matches and could make long fifth sets easier for fans to watch.

The Roland Garros final between Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz underlines the issue: they played 56 games and 352 points in those games, plus 33 more points in three tiebreakers. They played “at least five deuce games,” and the first game went to five deuces. No-ad would have made that final shorter, though by how much is a question worth answering.

No-ad is not new to the sport. The author played it in high school and college in the early 1990s, and the college game has more recently returned to no-ad. Change in tennis often needs a champion and a pathway through junior and lower-level events to build acceptance. The question is whether no-ad could be that pathway to protect players while keeping five-set drama intact.

Taylor Fritz arrives in the 2025 US Open quarter-finals as the last American remaining, carrying the weight of a tough draw. The world No 4 and fourth seed, who was runner-up at this event in 2024, now meets Novak Djokovic, the seventh seed in New York.

Djokovic’s fitness and motivation have come under scrutiny across 2025 and during this tournament, and he struggled early in Flushing Meadows. His fourth-round victory over Jan-Lennard Struff was described as his most convincing performance of the event so far and propelled him into a 14th US Open men’s singles quarter-final. That total is second only to Jimmy Connors (17) in the Open Era.

The head-to-head presents an even greater obstacle for Fritz. The American has lost all 10 of his previous matches against Djokovic. Their most recent meeting in a US Open quarter-final came in 2023, when Djokovic defeated Fritz 6-1, 6-4, 6-4 on his way to a major title.

For Djokovic, the match with Fritz will mark his 64th Grand Slam singles quarter-final overall. Notably, Flushing Meadows remains the only major at which he has never been beaten at the quarter-final stage. On 13 prior occasions that Djokovic reached the last eight at the US Open, he progressed each time to at least the semi-final.

Across his career he has been eliminated before the quarter-final round on five occasions: 2005, 2006, 2019, 2020, and 2024. His first US Open quarter-final victory came in 2007, when he beat Carlos Moya 6-4, 7-6(7), 6-1 en route to his first major final. Djokovic then recorded a sequence of ten straight quarter-final wins at the US Open, and by 2018 had made 11 quarter-finals in 11 appearances after withdrawing in 2017 due to injury.

His records at the other majors underline his consistency: 12-3 in Australian Open quarter-finals, 13-5 at Roland Garros (not including his 2024 withdrawal), and 14-2 at Wimbledon. Fritz faces one of the sternest tests possible in New York as Djokovic seeks to maintain his unblemished US Open quarter-final run.