FLUSHING MEADOWS, NY – In the box score, Jelena Jankovic’s third round win against Jie Zheng looked pretty easy, but it was harder than she expected.

The win in straight sets, 7-5, 7-5, made her work for the victory so much, she couldn’t even thing of what to say to the press afterwards.

“You think when I’m playing a match I’m thinking of what to say to you guys?” laughed Jankovic, now the favorite in the tournament after Ana Ivanovic’s ousting yesterday. “I’m thinking what they are going to tell me, because I had like five match points and I haven’t made them. What are they going to tell me? Of course not.”

The 23 year-old should have beat Zheng easily, but the 37th ranked Chinese national was able to keep fighting against Jankovic to make it a match.

“In the first set, I was serving quite well and holding my serves and doing quite well,” said Jankovic who beat Sweden’s Sofia Arvidsson on Wednesday in a three set scare. “Then in the second set, I don’t know what happened. I just lost my rhythm. Throughout the whole match, I had a really bad percentage of first serves and mainly playing with second serves, which didn’t help.”

She only shot 61 percent on the first serve for the match and committed 41 unforced errors, which made the game close. It’s something she needs to work on if Jankovic plans on advancing next week.

“I served pretty well the first set,” she said. “But then somehow I lost the timing in the second set, because maybe I got a little tired. And then when you don’t use your legs, you don’t accelerate as much with your arms, and the strokes fall apart.”

With Ivanovic out, Jankovic has a chance to win this tournament, which will be her first singles Grand Slam title. But that’s a long way away and the Serbian won’t have to worry about Ivanovic’s ouster until the finals.

“I’m in the lower side of the draw, so I really don’t have anything to do with the top side,” she said. “For me it doesn’t make a difference until if I go to the finals. We are complete on two different sides, so I follow my own side of the draw.”

And if that happens, she will have plenty of time to figure out what to say to the press.