Coco Gauff returns to US Open, beats Elina Svitolina. Emma Navarro is next
NEW YORK — Coco Gauff wasn’t aware that she had lost five straight matches against opponents ranked in the top 50. She didn’t know exactly how many points in a row she had lost – 11, it turned out – to lose the first set to Elina Svitolina in the US Open Third Round Friday.
So here’s what was abundantly clear to Gauff at that point: “I needed to reset.” So before the second set, the 20-year-old from Florida went to the bathroom, changed part of her outfit and splashed water on her face. Then Gauff returned to the court and extended the regulation time. defense of his first Grand Slam title by turning the tables to defeat the Svitolina, seeded number 27 3-6, 6-3, 6-3.
“I felt like a new person coming in,” said Gauff, seeded No. 3. “I just didn’t want to leave the court with any regrets.”
After making mistake after mistake early in the match at Arthur Ashe Stadium, Gauff managed to win nine of 11 games in a row and win again despite dropping the first set, something she did three times en route to winning the 2023 trophy at Flushing Meadows, including in the final against Aryna Sabalenka.
“I thought about it today. It gave me a lot of confidence,” Gauff said, “just because it felt like I had deja vu a little bit.”
On Sunday, Gauff will face No. 13 Emma Navarro, one of her teammates at the Paris Olympics, for a spot in the quarterfinals. Navarro eliminates Gauff in the fourth round at Wimbledon.
“I did a good job of neutralizing her serve and playing really aggressively from the baseline and stopping her groundstrokes,” Navarro, a South Carolina native and NCAA champion for Virginia, said of that match last month. “And then I was always able to put one more ball in the court.”
Navarro advanced Friday with a 6-4, 4-6, 6-3 victory over No. 19 Marta Kostyuk. Other women’s fourth-round matches scheduled for the afternoon were No. 7 Zheng Qinwen against No. 24 Donna Vekic, and No. 26 Paula Badosa against Wang Yafan. No. 2 Sabalenka was among the women scheduled to play in the evening, where the schedule also included 24-time major champion Novak Djokovic against No. 28 Alexei Popyrin.
The Djokovic-Popyrin winner meets No. 20 Frances Tiafoe, who came out of an all-American rematch against No. 13 Ben Shelton with a Victory 4-6, 7-5, 6-7 (5), 6-4, 6-3Shelton beat Tiafoe in the quarterfinals last year. Another American, No. 12 Taylor Fritz, beat Francisco Comesana 6-3, 6-4, 6-2.
The first men’s pairing of the fourth round was between No. 6 Andrey Rublev and No. 9 Grigor Dimitrov.
The Zheng-Vekic duel is a rematch of the gold medal match at the Summer Games four weeks ago, in which Zheng won.
Vekic beat Gauff in the third round at the Olympics, part of Gauff’s drought against top-50 opponents. It’s also part of a recent slump that has seen Gauff win just five of her last nine matches.
What a contrast to last year, when Gauff won 18 of 19 tournaments and 12 in a row, en route to two hard-court warm-up titles and then the US Open Championship making her the first American teenager to triumph at Flushing Meadows since Serena Williams in 1999.
At the end of the first set against Svitolina, it seemed that another defeat was in sight. Gauff committed 16 unforced errors, including nine on backhands, and only seven winners. She hit only 45% of her first serves. She had 0 of 3 break points. She allowed Svitolina to win 19 of 28 points that lasted more than four shots.
All of those stats improved in the final two sets, as Gauff tried to be more aggressive with her forehands and more cautious with her backhands. And something else changed, at the urging of her coaches: Gauff managed to engage the partisan crowd more.
Svitolina later said she was hampered by an ankle injury sustained last week.
“I feel like she started to push herself a little bit more. But to be honest, I didn’t play the way I wanted to. Then she started to be more alive,” said Svitolina, a three-time Grand Slam semifinalist. “And, of course, the crowd was behind her.”
It all started to change for Gauff on Friday after an hour and 10 minutes of play, when she broke for a 4-2 lead in the second set with a forehand crosscourt winner. She celebrated by shouting “Come on!” and raised her left hand to wiggle her fingers and ask the crowd to make more noise.
Soon the set belonged to Gauff, who closed it with a 94-mph ace, clenching her fist and screaming.
In the third round, with UConn women’s basketball stars Paige Bueckers and Azzi Fudd sitting in her guest box at Ashe, Gauff broke back early, then held on for a 2-0 lead with the help of a 38-shot point she took when Svitolina sent a backhand wide.
Soon the score was 5-1 for Gauff, whose only late misstep came when she served for the match at 5-2. She wasted three match points and was broken. But Gauff fought back to close out the match.
“I’m glad I had this match,” Gauff said, “because I think it makes me more resilient and prepares me, probably, for future challenges.”
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Tennis AP: https://apnews.com/hub/tennis
