Andy Murray battled his way into his 16th successive grand slam quarter-final with a victory over Bulgaria's Grigor Dimitrov at the Australian Open on Sunday. He will now meet Australian teenager Nick Kyrgios.
The positives for Kyrgios are that the Scot was subjected to 3½ hours of unrelenting, physically-demanding tennis and, for the first time in this tournament at least, showed his weaknesses.
The negatives are that, if Murray's four-set win over Dimitrov is any guide, then Kyrgios can expect a high-pressure, all-encompassing test of his game on Tuesday.
In outlasting explosive 10th seed Dimitrov, 6-4, 6-7 (5-7), 6-3, 7-5, at Rod Laver Arena, Murray had to fight for every point, hustling into the net and digging deep on the baseline to find his very best defensive skills.
But, ominously for Kyrgios, Murray, in turn, made Dimitrov work just as hard and produce some incredible shots just to stay in a series of "point-of-the-tournament" calibre rallies.
And, in the end, the sixth seed from Great Britain won, not by pouncing on every opportunity to finish Dimitrov — he wasn't that clinical — but rather by pushing his opponent closer and closer to his breaking point.
It would not have fully healed the deep wound Dimitrov inflicted on Murray by knocking him out of Wimbledon last year — when Murray was the reigning champion at his home Open — but upstaging the rising star in such a high-class showdown must have been satisfying.
Murray took four games to snap out of a passive start, winning six of the last seven games of the first set to take it 6-4, having been down 0-3.
He could have potentially ended the night sooner when he served for the second set at 6-5. However Dimitrov raised the intensity to another level by forcing a tie-breaker and then winning it 7-5.
Murray seemed to steal the third set against the flow of play, coming on late to take it 6-3, and then showed admirable grit to hunker down when trailing 5-2 in the fourth.
Breaking point for Dimitrov came after dropping a fourth straight game late in the fourth set.
The Bulgarian destroyed his racquet by violently launching it into the surface, after a frustrating 15 minutes during which he made a series of bad shot choices.
As the clock ticked over to 12.25am on Australia Day, Murray served out the fourth set to win 7-5 and turn his attention to huge crowd favourite Kyrgios.
If Murray has flown under the radar so far in this tournament — this was the first time he had been truly tested, having not dropped a set in his first three rounds and losing just 26 games in total — then this win, and the looming blockbuster against Kyrgios, will certainly change that.
Murray could not help but get an early sense of the hype that will accompany the build-up to Tuesday's meeting with Kyrgios.
Throughout his match, roars from Hisense Arena — where Kyrgios was playing — could be easily heard inside neighbouring Rod Laver Arena, and there was even a brief delay during the Murray-Dimitrov match when the crowd erupted into applause once Kyrgios had won.
