Zheng Qinwen forgot the score. Twice.

With Iga Świątek serving for the first set at 5-4 on Arthur Ashe on Monday afternoon, Zheng Qinwen realised she had forgotten the score.

She had been down 0-5 earlier in the set. She had won four games in a row to get back to 4-5, was one break from getting to five-all, and by her own account, in the moment on the return, she stopped keeping count.

“I even forgot the score in the first set at 4-5. That shows how I’m focused,” she said afterwards on court.

She broke Świątek, held her own serve and broke Świątek again, then took the set 7-5. Świątek was broken early in the second, and Zheng held to the end, closing the match out 6-3. The world number eight, six times a Grand Slam champion and six times unbeaten against Zheng, was in tears on the way off court. Zheng, ranked one hundred and twenty-one and in the tournament as a qualifier, was into the quarter-finals, and it was the second time in three days this had happened.

Twice

On Saturday, on Grandstand against Madison Keys, Zheng was 5-0 down in the third and final set. Keys, the twenty-second seed and 2025 Australian Open champion, was serving at 5-1 with a match point. Zheng won seven games in a row taking the final set 7-5, with a match result of 1-6 7-6(3) 7-5.

On Monday, on Arthur Ashe against Świątek, Zheng was 0-5 down in the first, with Świątek serving at 5-1 with a set point. Zheng won seven games in a row, took the set 7-5 and then closed the match out 6-3.

Same score, same shape, the same seven-game answer two matches apart.

Asked afterwards how the second one had felt on court after the first, Zheng answered:

“Well, honestly, I have to say I start the match not so well, and after a little by little, I find my rhythm on the center court because it’s been a long, long time I haven’t played on the center court. I just focus point by point, and little by little I start to play better tennis.”

Then, one question later:

“[The] come back 0-5 yesterday is not lucky. That’s all I can say.”

The word she used three months ago

At Roland Garros in May, three months and one qualifying event ago, Zheng lost in the first round to Maja Chwalinska, who went on to reach the final of that tournament. It was Zheng’s first Grand Slam back from arthroscopic surgery on her right elbow in July 2025. She sat in the press conference afterwards and cried.

“After coming back from injury I felt I lost the energy and I forgot how to compete,” she said.

Three months later, on Arthur Ashe, she forgot the score at 4-5 in the first set of her fourth-round match against a top-ten opponent she had never previously beaten. Then she won it.

She forgot how to compete then, and she forgot the score now, the same verb three months apart doing opposite work.

Seven matches

Zheng, according to the seeding sheet, was not supposed to be at this US Open at all. Her career-high ranking is four in the world, reached in early 2025. Her ranking now is one hundred and twenty-one, having dropped as low as one hundred and sixty during her comeback. She returned early from her elbow surgery to play her home tournament in Beijing in October last year, which meant she did not qualify for the protected ranking that would have got her wildcards into everything else.

The seven Grand Slam matches she has now played at Flushing Meadows over the past two weeks are seven matches she chose to play. She could have made a case for a wildcard in the American swing, or waited for the Asian swing where she is guaranteed the entry as a home favourite. Plenty of former top-four players in her position would have done exactly that. Zheng went to qualifying.

“I was even crying after I won the third match to reach the main draw,” she said last week. “The main draw is just the beginning where all the players start. That was my beginning before. I fight so hard just to start like everyone else. For me, that was really not easy.”

Zheng is the first women’s qualifier to reach the US Open quarter-final since Emma Raducanu did it on her way to winning the tournament in 2021, per Opta, the sports data service that tracks these records.

She got there via seven matches. Three rounds of qualifying, then Liutova, Putintseva, Keys and Świątek. Three of the four main-draw matches have gone to three sets.

At the start of the fortnight we wrote up six qualifiers worth following at this US Open. Zheng was one of them. Of the six, she is the last one standing.

What she did differently on Ashe

Zheng, asked on court what she did differently, replied:

“I think in the baseline, I try to play more flat against her because I think she has really good topspin, makes me feel really uncomfortable. And I try to play more aggressive because I remember when I just came on the tour, the match I lost against her is because I wasn’t aggressive enough and I tried to stay with her as long as I can.”

That is a specific and deliberate adjustment against a player she had never beaten in six previous meetings. Flatter contact to take the height off Świątek’s topspin. More aggressive on the point rather than trying to out-last from the back of the court. It worked. Świątek finished the match with seventeen winners against twenty-eight unforced errors.

The Sky Sports commentators, watching Zheng walk to the net for the handshake, both said that her movement looked better than they remembered from her top-four period. Almost a weapon. Martina Navratilova, in the same commentary, picked up the shadow line moving across Ashe during the first set, bright sunshine at one end and shade retreating towards the baseline at the other. Both players had to deal with it. Only one of them had already played six matches at this tournament to get the rhythm to deal with it well.

What comes next

Zheng plays her quarter-final tomorrow. Her opponent will come out of the other round-of-sixteen match in her section, still to be played. She was asked whether she was tired. Her answer, before she left the court was:

“More matches I play, more rhythm I got on court. People often ask me if you are tired. I mean, when I arrive to here, I’m not tired at all. I just feel really pumped for my next match.”

She had said something similar to the press after qualifying, before the tournament began. She had said something similar to it in the Keys interview on Saturday. She said it again tonight.

The elbow. The ranking. The route through qualifying. The two seven-game comebacks. The forgotten score at 4-5 on Ashe.

Tomorrow she plays a quarter-final she has earned by playing tennis nobody standing at 0-5 has any professional reason to still be playing.

That is part of a player’s game too.