It looked, for a good hour at least, as though there might be the biggest of upsets in round two of the 2025 Australian Open Junior Championships.

Top seed Emerson Jones dropped the first set on a tie-break to the American Thea Frodin, who is ranked No. 25 and in the ITF World Tennis Tour Junior Rankings and was playing in her first Australian Open. 

The effervescent Jones - backed heavily by the home crowd, as expected - responded by stepping up a gear to lead 2-1 in set two. A game later Frodin left court for medical attention and returned afterwards with her left thigh heavily bandaged.

These things can disrupt but Jones kept her composure, showing guts to win the pivotal seventh game in the last set and edge ahead 4-3. Two games later she was through, 6-7 6-2 6-3 the outcome. 

The match stats were telling with 14 aces and 21 double-faults to Frodin with the far more even Jones finishing with one ace and just three double-faults. Frodin made 68 unforced errors - an extraordinary count - to Jones's 32.

All done, it was a first-rate workout for the Aussie who will simply be relieved to be in the third round.

As well as being a match court, Court No. 11 is also where a lot of the players are sent to practice at the AO. It has an open corridor along one side and can often be packed four or five deep whenever a star name has a non-competitive hit there.

It was quiet though for the 11am Monday match between Austria’s Lilli Tagger and Teodora Kostovic from Serbia.

Kostovic, playing her eighth Junior Grand Slam, curiously opted to turn out in a long sleeved top in what was the most humid of days. She had the edge from the start, the first set done and dusted 6-4 before easing to a 2-0 lead in set two.

Tagger, a 16-year-old Austrian playing her first AO, had not troubled her unduly at this point but gradually asserted herself as the Serbian's level slipped. The second set went to Tagger before the Serb retired on serve at 2-4 in the final set.

Tagger will face Britain’s Mingge Xu in the third round.

Eighteen-year-old Shiho Tsujioka, meanwhile, will be thankful that her second-round 6-4 7-6(5) win over Romania’s Anamaria Federica Oana lasted just two sets.

Fronting up for a post-match chat, she sat shattered in an easy chair that looked like it might be some challenge to get up from such was her apparent state of exhaustion.

It turned out she was waiting for an English-speaking interpreter who then explained that Tsujioka had only recently recovered from flu, which earlier this month prevented her from practising for about a week. It was only the day before her first qualifying match that she was able to wield a racket, the interpreter said.

Tsujioka was helped hugely in this match by her opponent’s hit-and-miss style which saw her rack up errors and winners aplenty but with little in-between.

“She doesn’t care if it’s a winner, a point is a point and she is concerned about just getting one more point than her opponent,” said the interpreter. “If an opponent makes a winner then just let it go.”

The final point of the match finally brought some obvious emotion from Tsujioka, as she dashed across to thank her coach.

A few autographs followed.

Did you enjoy that?

“Yes,” said Tsujioka.

A full list of results from the 2025 Australian Open Junior Championships is available here