If Johanna Konta goes on to win the Australian Open it will be with the sort of controlled efficiency she showed to overpower the Japanese teenager Naomi Osaka 6-4, 6-2 on Rod Laver Arena on day four.

The world No9, who absorbed her opponent’s best work in a lively start then ground her down, is through to the third round in the toughest section of the women’s draw but playing with the sort of consistency that makes her a genuine threat.

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She squandered two break points in the fifth game and had to save one of her own in the eighth, but Osaka was a little too eager in the shot and blew her chance, powerless to reach the fourth and fifth aces to fly past her in just half an hour. Konta’s serving was phenomenal, hitting 89%, so the Japanese teenager was doing well to even make a game of it.

Konta got another look on the Osaka serve in the ninth game, and this time she nailed it with an angled backhand into the deuce corner, then finished the job to go a set up with chilling precision.

Although Osaka remained competitive, she could not handle Konta’s relentless attacks on either wing and, nursing a strain in her left wrist, she suffered on the backhand as the British No1 drove on to an impressive win in just over an hour on a warm, humidity-free morning.

She moved well and her repeatable, machine-like serving action provided a solid base for her open-court game. Although there are tough matches in front of her if she is to match her achievements of last year, when she made the semi-finals, Konta could not be in better shape to win her first major.

She made only 13 unforced errors, hit nine aces, one double fault and won 32 of 36 first serves. Those were numbers that the promising Osaka, who saved two match points, could not cope with.

“I guess it’s surprising that the work and the travel is exactly the same as it always was,” she said courtside when asked how her life had changed from being a hunter to the hunted. “I’m looking forward to staying here as long as possible. Naomi is one of the up and coming players, with really impressive results over the past year or so. I knew it was a given that I had to be there for every single point.”

In the first round of the men’s doubles, Ken and Neal Skupski beat the Colombian 14th seeds Juan Sebastian Cabal and Robert Farah 6-3, 6-4. The Liverpool brothers might have played compatriot Dan Evans and Nick Kyrgios in the next round, but the Australian withdrew after losing his singles the previous night, gifting progress in the draw to Serbian Dušan Lajović and Croatia’s Viktor Troicki.