Coco Gauff regularly earned a ticket to the third round of the US Open, but she will now play Elina Svitolina, who will be a formidable opponent.
The reigning US Open champion Gauff overcame Tatjana Maria, who was a semifinalist at Wimbledon in 2022, 6-4 6-0, despite struggling a little bit earlier in the match and finishing with 12 winners and 17 unforced errors. The American tennis player lost her serve just once in the opening set and went on to collect five breaks during the match.
Conversely, Svitolina, ranked 27th, defeated Anhelina Kalinina, a fellow Ukrainian, 6-1, 6-2, after registering 27 winners in an hour and seventeen minutes of action. The Ukrainian took two breaks in each of the two sets, and that was sufficient to ensure a resounding win.
One matchup that caught people’s attention when the US Open draw was revealed was that No. 3 seed Gauff and Svitolina might face one other in the third round. And that’s exactly what’s going to happen now that the two are going to square up for the third time. Gauff was defeated by Svitolina in the 2021 Australian Open, but earlier this year in Auckland, the American exacted retribution.
Will Andy Roddick’s prediction about Gauff vs Svitolina be correct?
Since Gauff entered the US Open in poor form – having lost very early in Toronto and Cincinnati – American tennis legend Roddick wasn’t really high on the 20-year-old’s chances of repeating as champion. And while assessing Gauff’s draw, the 2003 US Open champion predicted that she would be bounced in the third round by Svitolina.
“This next one, I don’t like doing it. All cards on the table, I have a bias towards Coco Gauff but I still have to try to be objective. I like Svitolina to round three, I like Coco to round three, I think I like Svitolina to round four. I’d love to be wrong. Again, I value current form and Coco is searching. She would probably tell you she’s searching. I haven’t talked to Brad in a month but I gotta think they know that. I don’t know if I can put Coco through to the quarters,” Roddick said on the Served with Andy Roddick podcast.
