No.3 Coco Gauff vs. No.24 Elise Mertens
After winning the US Open last year at the age of 19, checking off her most urgent bucket-list item, Coco Gauff recalibrated her mindset. We can happily report that the pressure is off.
“That’s probably the only time-constraint goal I ever made for myself, which probably is more pressing,” Gauff told reporters here at the BNP Paribas Open. “I think everything else is just, whenever it happens, it happens.
“I guess now looking at what’s next — yeah, 20 is a long time to play. So I don’t have any time-constraint goals any more on myself.”
That doesn’t mean that her ambition has cooled — far from it. On Wednesday, her 20th birthday, Gauff launches the next chapter of her life. To set it up, she dispatched Lucia Bronzetti 6-2, 7-6 (5) while Mertens was a 7-5, 6-4 winner over Naomi Osaka.
“I think almost every time I play her is a tough match,” Gauff said of Mertens. “I don’t recall any straightforward wins playing against her. Even though the record is 3-0, it could easily have been the opposite. She’s tough.”
Gauff has beaten Mertens in each of the past three seasons — on three different surfaces – at Eastbourne, Roland Garros and the US Open. Each match — weirdly — involved a 6-0 set going one way or the other.
