A nervous Coco Gauff relied on her competitive instincts and her superior physical game to overcome 27th seed Elina Svitolina 3-6, 6-3, 6-3 and advance to the fourth round, in a match lasting just over two hours.
Defending champion Gauff began nervously double faulting on the second point and at times looked far off her usual high standards, but showed great resilience to fight back from a set down and used the crowd to her advantage and lives to fight another day.
“This win means a lot,” said Gauff on court afterwards. “I knew today was going to be a tough match. Every time I play Elina, she’s a fighter. I knew I had to bring my best tennis. I thought I played well. I served much better than last match except the last service game but overall I was proud of what I was able to do.”
Despite winning a huge 90% of points behind first serve in the first set, Gauff dropped serve to love at 4-3 down to hand her Ukrainian opponent the initiative. Svitolina, who occasionally looked hampered by a foot injury, served out to complete silence on the Arthur Ashe arena while Gauff decided on a racket change.
Third seed Gauff upped her second serve percentages drastically from 28% in the first to 70% in the second set and then broke serve at just the right time when 4-3 ahead with a big forehand return followed by another forehand cross court winner, and quickly levelled the match at a set all.
She continued to ride the momentum and pounced on an early chance at the start of the third set and then held serve to go 2-0 ahead, orchestrating the crowd at the right moments and looked comfortable as she finally took the lead.
Former top five ranked Svitolina looked despondent and was pushed further and further behind the baseline as the match progressed. At 40-30 up when 1-3 down, she missed a sitter; an easy put-away high forehand volley was instead dumped into the net, and more errors followed as she went a double break down.
However, there was another twist. When Gauff was serving for the match at 5-2 up, even after racing to a 40-0 lead she was pulled back to deuce as Svitolina fought back to win four points in a row to bring up breakpoint. The crowd rallied behind the American – who threw in two double faults – to pull her through but Svitolina broke back for 3-5.
But Gauff held herself together and broke to love to win the contest on her fourth match point when Svitolina her hit final forehand error into the net. A jubilant Gauff jumped with joy and cupped her hand to her ear as she looked for even more noise from the centre court crowd, while Svitolina made a hasty exit.
Although Gauff is into the fourth round, she will have to raise her levels considerably if she is to make it to the final rounds of the Slam she won last year. But for now, she can breathe a sigh of relief after her first serious test of the championships. In previous rounds, she had won two of her four sets by a 6-0 scoreline.
When asked about how she turned the match around, she replied: “I think I tried to be more aggressive, especially on my forehand side and making less errors on the backhand side. I was missing a lot of backhands in the net so I was just trying to make less errors. She was playing well. She was playing aggressive. She was hitting her spots and I think the difference was just me being more aggressive, especially on serve.”
