Women's No.2 seed Petra Kvitova has booked a maiden Australian Open semi-final berth with a hard-fought straight sets win over unseeded Italian Sara Errani.
It was far from a vintage performance from the 2011 Wimbledon champion, but she got the job done 6-4 6-4 in one hour and 51 minutes, setting up a semi-final clash against one of the Russian pair Maria Sharapova and Ekaterina Makarova, who meet later on Wednesday.
It represents just the third time the 21-year-old Czech has made it to the semi-final of a Grand Slam and the first time she has achieved that feat outside the grass courts of Wimbledon.
It was a scrappy start to the match with both players dropping their opening service game and Kvitova making an extraordinary 10 unforced errors in the first two games.
The world No.2 then settled down to break the Italian in the third and seventh games and while Errani was able to stay in the set by breaking Kvitova when she was serving for it, the Czech took her chance second time around to secure the advantage.
Kvitova again got the early break in the second set, but let herself down with another run of unforced errors which allowed Errani to break back, hold easily and break her again.
The underdog raced to a 4-1 lead but just when it looked like she was about to push it to a third set, she faltered. Kvitova pounced with breaks in the seven and ninth games and put the match on her racquet.
She served it out to love to prevail in spite of a massive unforced error count (44) as compared to just 20 winners.
For Errani, it ends her best-ever Grand Slam showing, but the 24-year-old will have plenty of confidence having knocked out Nadia Petrova, Sorana Cirstea and Jie Zheng along the way.