DUBAI - World No.1 Novak Djokovic and defending champion Roger Federer moved closer to a mouth-watering Dubai Open final showdown when they cruised into the last four yesterday.
Australian Open winner Djokovic extended his unbeaten 2013 sequence to 11 with a trampling 6-0 6-3 success over Andreas Seppi which suggested that he will be very hard to stop.
Federer was equally impressive, needing just 54 minutes to beat Russia's Nikolay Davydenko 6-2 6-2, firing five aces in the process.
Djokovic's dashing court coverage and imposingly aggressive service returns so much intimidated Seppi, a talented ground-stroker, that the seventh-seeded Italian won only three points on his service in a morale-eroding 24-minute first set.
The second set offered only a little more comfort.
"I'm pleased that it was an even better performance than in my first two matches and that I'm elevating my level. Hopefully I can sustain that," he said of Friday's semi-final with Juan Martin Del Potro, the former US Open champion, who beat Daniel Brands, a German qualifier, by 6-4 6-2.
It was a big-serving battle of the two tallest men in the tournament, and for a while, until 4-4 in the first set it seemed that Brands might be capable of creating further upsets in the Gulf.
He beat two leading Frenchmen, Gael Monfils and Jeremy Chardy, while reaching the semi-finals in Doha last month, but once Del Potro broke serve to snatch the first set, his chances of a third notable success evaporated.