Williams, a seven-time singles and 14-time women’s doubles Grand Slam champion, is playing her 25th US Open.<\/p>\n
She won the first of her two women’s doubles titles in New York with younger sister Serena in 1999, three years before Fernandez was born.<\/p>\n
Addressing Williams in her on-court interview, former US Open singles runner-up Fernandez said: “Seeing you play on court with the same big smile you had back then is so inspirational and motivates me to keep going. I love that you love tennis.”<\/p>\n
It is the first time that Williams has reached the quarter-finals of a major since winning the Wimbledon title, also alongside Serena, in 2016.<\/p>\n
Asked if she had a message for her younger sibling, Williams joked: “She’s so happy for Leylah and I, she’s given us advice and we just need her in the box, so my message is ‘Serena, you need to show up!'”<\/p>\n
Their quarter-final opponents could be top seeds Katerina Siniakova and Taylor Townsend, whose third-round match had not begun when Williams and Fernandez left the court having signed autographs for many of their waiting supporters.<\/p>\n
For Alexandrova, it was the second defeat of the day on Louis Armstrong Stadium, having earlier been knocked out of the singles by Iga Swiatek on the same court.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Williams, a seven-time singles and 14-time women’s doubles Grand Slam champion, is playing her 25th US Open. She…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":391360,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4105],"tags":[79,1068,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-391359","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-tennis","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115133617652589165","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=391359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391359\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/391360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=391359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=391359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=391359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}