Jack Draper will face No.10 seed Alex De Minaur in his first Grand Slam quarter-final at the US Open after nearly giving up the sport because of lockdown and then injuries.

The British No.1 said: “I think I’ve been through a lot the last few years with injuries and, you know, there were times when I was maybe gonna stop playing tennis and all this sort of stuff.

“I had multiple moments. It was a real grind for a few years. It’s not the sort of strawberries and cream of Wimbledon that I expected, you know?

“And during lockdown, I think I just had a real reflection. You’re just stuck in obviously in the Futures and sometimes in the Challengers, you’re in Egypt for five weeks in the same place, so you can’t go anywhere.

“You’re just seeing the courts, the hotel and the food hall. You know, that’s it for five weeks. And it’s a real mental battle

“And, I generally thought that maybe I wasn’t cut out for tennis, but I had good people around me. I came back and, worked hard, and then, yeah, had another little moment in 2022 where I kind of thought, with all my injuries that I was having and the hard times I was going through whether, again I was not going to be good enough to sustain being the top player I wanted to be.

“Because I didn’t want to ever play tennis to be a player who wasn’t going to be a top player. I was almost sold a dream, you know, I thought it was going to be easy for me, and I was going to get up there, but the reality was, it was incredibly difficult.

“And the chances are that I wasn’t going to be able to do that, and stuff like this. So that was hard to get my head round.

“But I’d say, in the last year or so, you know, I’m beginning to believe more and more in my capabilities, and more and more in the possibility that, you know, hopefully one day those dreams can come true.”

After facing four unseeded players, the No.25 seed is now the lowest ranked player left in the draw before facing world No.10 De Minaur.