Lleyton Hewitt is
leaving the trash talk to his home town footy rivals this week as he
moves to within one match of a US Open semi-final showdown with arch rival and defending
champion Roger Federer.

Third seed Hewitt
showed earlier today that despite his limited preparation, he’s as
ready as he can be after easily seeing off Slovakia’s Dominik Hrbaty
6-1, 6-4, 6-2. Federer also kept up his end of maintaining the
probability of this widely anticipated duel, despite dropping his first
set of
the tournament as he progressed to the quarters, by dispatching
Germany’s Nicolas Kiefer 6-4, 6-7 (3-7), 6-3, 6-4.

With Hewitt in cruise control, today’s win
demonstrates that for all the talk about his
lack of big weapons other than the game’s biggest ticker, the
pugnacious
Aussie has now made the quarter-finals for the sixth straight year. And
his reward for
dispatching the 15th seeded Hrbaty in just 94 minutes is a match-up
with unseeded Finn Jarkko Nieminen, the first Grand Slam
quarter-final appearance by a
Finn.

Presuming he does slip
the Finn, and Federer gets past the winner of the clash between David
Nalbandian – a fully paid up member of Hewitt’s Argentine players’ fan club –
and Italy’s Davide Sanguinetti, then we have what our domestic TV audience will
regard as the real US Open final a match early.
Hewitt will be trying to shut out the memory of last year’s dismal final
when he was smashed in straight sets 6-0, 7-6, 6-0 by the Federer “Express” –
no doubt much to the financial chagrin of the TV networks denied a decent run
at their scheduled advertising.

“Nine times out
of 10 I think if you’re going to win the tournament, you’re going to have to
come up against Federer at some stage at the moment,” Hewitt said today of the
looming date with destiny. “So it’s
not something you focus on. Against
Nieminen, whether it takes me an hour and a half or four-and-a-half hours, I
just want to get the win on the board.”