Kerber and Konta must keep their minds clear, writes Peter Hanlon.
Tennis messes with the mind as maddeningly as any sport. For the combatants of the second women's semi-final at the Australian Open, the game between the ears will do much to determine what happens between the sidelines.
From one end, Angelique Kerber will look across the net and try to ignore all that is seemingly in her favour: that she is the seventh seed, so getting this far should be no great surprise; that she has been to the last four of a grand slam twice already; that her most recent victim, Victoria Azarenka, is a two-time champion here whose form was white-hot before Kerber wiped her 6-3, 7-5 in Wednesday's quarter-finals. 
She will push all this aside and fall back on a sobering mantra. "You know, actually it doesn't matter against who I'm playing in the semis. I mean, who is in the semis [has] played very good four matches actually, or five matches. I will try to not think against who I'm playing." Staring back at her on a stage nobody imagined she would be strutting, Johanna Konta will attempt some mental trickery of her own. The 24-year-old will try to ignore the reality that she was ranked 149 in the world when she lost in qualifying at last year's Australian Open, yet will leave Melbourne inside the top 30, a rise so rapid it could bring on vertigo.
She will do her best to blank out the numbers that swirl in Kerber's favour, not least that her quarter-final victim Shuai Zhang was the world No.133, while her opponent took out a former world No.1. She will try to shrug off the weight of a kingdom's expectation - that she is not only Britain's No.1 and new darling, and not just its first grand slam semi-finalist since Jo Durie at the 1983 US Open, but could also become its first finalist since Virginia Wade won Wimbledon in 1977.
"The UK is a number of thousands of miles away and a completely different time zone, which in this case it might be quite nice," Konta said. "I think whatever pressure or whatever buzz there is outside, I mean, it only affects me as much as I let it."
Straw-clutching locals will hail Konta as the first Australian-born semi-finalist since Wendy Turnbull in 1981, courtesy of a Sydney upbringing that ended aged 13 when her Hungarian parents relocated as tennis took their daughter to Spain.
She confirmed her dual citizenship on Wednesday, adding that with a Hungarian passport as well she is something of a female Jason Bourne, after the Robert Ludlum character brought to life by Matt Damon.
Not that she has an identity crisis. "That's a really lost cause. I definitely belong to Great Britain."
Convincing herself she belongs at a grand slam's pointy end is her next challenge, one Kerber first grappled with when she lost in the semis to eventual champion Sam Stosur at the 2011 US Open (she also bowed out in the Wimbledon semis the following year to Agnieszka Radwanska). Her sweeping leftie's game, court coverage and determination were all on song against Azarenka, earning a little history of her own as the first German through to the last four here since Anke Huber in 1998.
"I was just trying to focus on my game, to be aggressive, to be the player who makes the winners and who is going for it," Kerber said of an approach she vowed to carry into Thursday's meeting with Konta.
The Briton's 6-4, 6-1 dismissal of Zhang killed off the other half of the Open's fairytale - the 27-year-old former world No.30 whose ranking had plummeted to 133 when she arrived in Melbourne contemplating retirement, who had not registered a single win in 14 grand slam attempts. They embraced warmly at the net, Konta telling Zhang she'd had a tournament to be proud of.
As has Konta, who fleshed out her backstory by debunking a tale that she had been a promising swimmer who turned to tennis because of persistent ear infections.
"I didn't learn to swim till I was about 14," she said.
Asked if her approach might be too calculated to allow full appreciation of her 2016 Australian Open journey, Konta said she was humbled and grateful to have come this far. "Trust me, I understand how much this means to my family, to the people that have stuck by me through years and years and years of ups and downs.
"But in terms of what it means to me, I'm just so happy that I'm enjoying what I'm doing. That is me living my dream. You know, yeah, when I was a little girl I dreamed of winning grand slams and being No.1 in the world. That dream stays the same."