When at home, James McCabe spends so long at Sydney Olympic Park’s tennis centre you could also accuse him of sleeping there.

On Friday, he did.

Tucked in a little corner of the physio room, the hometown boy curled up and slept without a care in the world as the Perpetual NSW Open ground to a frustrating halt for more than three hours due to a weather delay.  

For how long, McCabe is not even sure.

“I woke up and they were drying the courts,” he said.

Locked in a tense first-set struggle with fellow Sydneysider and the tournament’s second seed Rinky Hijikata, McCabe quickly found his groove upon the resumption and survived a couple of nervous moments in the second set to claim the biggest scalp on the men’s side of the draw.

McCabe’s 6-3, 7-5 win came a week after a scheduling nightmare when he was humbled in a first round clash against 16-year-old Cruz Hewitt in Brisbane only hours after he jumped off a plane from Taipei, where he was a Challenger semi-finalist.

If his fluro green shorts didn’t catch the eye on a gloomy day of quarter-final action, then McCabe’s shot-making certainly did.

Having missed a match point on Hijikata’s serve at 5-3 in the second set, and then failing to serve the match out, McCabe’s outrageous sliding one-handed backhand winner past an onrushing Hijikata sealed the decisive break. His group of friends were so close to the fence they could have high-fived him as it whistled down the line.

“Rinky and I have played a few times and we train a lot together, so it’s always tough playing each other because we know what each want to do,” McCabe said. “It could have gone either way, so I’m just happy to get the win.

“Rinky is an amazing player and I’m just grateful I got there.”

McCabe, ranked 196 in the world before this week, will play his semi-final against Japanese surprise packet Hayato Matsuoka, who fought back to beat Tai Sach in three sets.

Ranked 483 in the world and having already swept past Bernard Tomic and Hewitt, Matsuoka continued his giant-killing run with a 4-6, 7-5, 6-1 victory on an outside court which was also subject to the weather delay.

The other men’s semi-final on Saturday will feature James Duckworth and Jason Kubler, with Duckworth halting Dane Sweeny’s incredible recent run with a 6-2, 6-3 win while Kubler stopped Bolt’s winning sequence 7-5, 6-3.

On the women’s side, top seed Kim Birrell and defending champion Emerson Jones took another step to a potential final after both eased to straight sets wins in the final eight.

Jones was the only winner of the four women’s matches on Friday scheduled to play on an outdoor court and had to endure the lengthy break before returning to shade Elena Micic in the first set tiebreak to set up a 7-6(6), 6-2 win.

Birrell needed only 74 minutes to beat Taipei’s Ya Yi Yang 6-3, 6-2.