Coco Gauff defeated Emma Raducanu in a battle between two of the WTA Tour's bright young stars to reach the third round of the Australian Open on Wednesday, after world No 1 Iga Swiatek continued her bid for a fourth Grand Slam title.
Gauff and 2021 US Open champion Raducanu are separated by 70 places in the world rankings but their contest inside the Rod Laver Arena suggested that this could be a rivalry to watch for years to come.
American Gauff, who first broke through as a 15-year-old when she reached the fourth round of Wimbledon in 2019, showed why she is a contender for the title at Melbourne Park with an entertaining 6-3, 7-6 win over the 20-year-old Briton.
"I just told myself to hang in there and I was playing really good tennis towards the end," said Gauff. "In a Slam you have to win seven matches, you have to expect to play the best. Obviously you hope it's not in the second round, but that's what can happen."
Raducanu, who is ranked 77, showed no signs of the ankle injury that forced her out of the recent Auckland Classic, where Gauff won for her third WTA Tour title.
"Kudos to Emma," said Gauff. "I know she had a tough week in Auckland. So really good for her to be able to play this level after such a scary moment.
"The whole match was great and considering the circumstances I can imagine both of us were nervous. This was a long-anticipated match-up since the draw came out."
Earlier on Wednesday, top seed Swiatek continued to look like the player to beat with a 6-2, 6-3 win over Colombia's Camila Osorio.
The title favourite from Poland said after a tough first-round examination that she needed to find some extra "intensity", and she found the spark against the 21-year-old world No 84.
The 2022 French and US Open champion, also 21, is looking to win the Australian Open for the first time and reached the last 32 after one hour and 24 minutes of gritty resistance from Osorio.
"The match was much tougher than the score says," said Swiatek, who made her Australian Open debut in 2019.
"It was really intense physically and Camila didn't give me many points for free, so I needed to really work for every and each of them. But I'm happy that I was consistent and I can play the next round."
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Attacks on Egypt’s long rooted Copts
Egypt’s Copts belong to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, with Mark the Evangelist credited with founding their church around 300 AD. Orthodox Christians account for the overwhelming majority of Christians in Egypt, with the rest mainly made up of Greek Orthodox, Catholics and Anglicans.
The community accounts for some 10 per cent of Egypt’s 100 million people, with the largest concentrations of Christians found in Cairo, Alexandria and the provinces of Minya and Assiut south of Cairo.
Egypt’s Christians have had a somewhat turbulent history in the Muslim majority Arab nation, with the community occasionally suffering outright persecution but generally living in peace with their Muslim compatriots. But radical Muslims who have first emerged in the 1970s have whipped up anti-Christian sentiments, something that has, in turn, led to an upsurge in attacks against their places of worship, church-linked facilities as well as their businesses and homes.
More recently, ISIS has vowed to go after the Christians, claiming responsibility for a series of attacks against churches packed with worshippers starting December 2016.
The discrimination many Christians complain about and the shift towards religious conservatism by many Egyptian Muslims over the last 50 years have forced hundreds of thousands of Christians to migrate, starting new lives in growing communities in places as far afield as Australia, Canada and the United States.
Here is a look at major attacks against Egypt's Coptic Christians in recent years:
November 2: Masked gunmen riding pickup trucks opened fire on three buses carrying pilgrims to the remote desert monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor south of Cairo, killing 7 and wounding about 20. IS claimed responsibility for the attack.
May 26, 2017: Masked militants riding in three all-terrain cars open fire on a bus carrying pilgrims on their way to the Monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor, killing 29 and wounding 22. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.
April 2017: Twin attacks by suicide bombers hit churches in the coastal city of Alexandria and the Nile Delta city of Tanta. At least 43 people are killed and scores of worshippers injured in the Palm Sunday attack, which narrowly missed a ceremony presided over by Pope Tawadros II, spiritual leader of Egypt Orthodox Copts, in Alexandria's St. Mark's Cathedral. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks.
February 2017: Hundreds of Egyptian Christians flee their homes in the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula, fearing attacks by ISIS. The group's North Sinai affiliate had killed at least seven Coptic Christians in the restive peninsula in less than a month.
December 2016: A bombing at a chapel adjacent to Egypt's main Coptic Christian cathedral in Cairo kills 30 people and wounds dozens during Sunday Mass in one of the deadliest attacks carried out against the religious minority in recent memory. ISIS claimed responsibility.
July 2016: Pope Tawadros II says that since 2013 there were 37 sectarian attacks on Christians in Egypt, nearly one incident a month. A Muslim mob stabs to death a 27-year-old Coptic Christian man, Fam Khalaf, in the central city of Minya over a personal feud.
May 2016: A Muslim mob ransacks and torches seven Christian homes in Minya after rumours spread that a Christian man had an affair with a Muslim woman. The elderly mother of the Christian man was stripped naked and dragged through a street by the mob.
New Year's Eve 2011: A bomb explodes in a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria as worshippers leave after a midnight mass, killing more than 20 people.
