Coco Gauff beats Madison Keys to reach French Open semifinals
ROLAND GARROS, PARIS — With a display that epitomized her relentlessness on the biggest stages, Coco Gauff knocked Madison Keys out of the French Open.
In a contest of who could keep the ball on the court the most, Gauff was better when she needed to be, toppling the Australian Open champion 6-7(6) 6-4, 6-2 to reach her third Roland Garros semifinal.
The two American title hopefuls, nearly a decade apart in age but seemingly destined to battle not just each other, but the promise they’ve long carried through their careers, did not play a beautiful match.
Instead, this was a two-part test. Gauff and Keys both had to overcome a tough-as-nails opponent. They also had to overcome two hours and 11 minutes in which both players struggled to summon their best tennis.
What unfolded was a pendulum swing between the two qualities that have made them factors at this stage of majors: Keys’ preternatural calm under pressure and Gauff’s preternatural ability to stay in any match, no matter the momentum. Keys surged to an early lead as Gauff kept shooting for the lines and missing. Twenty minutes after the first ball, Keys was serving at 4-1 and it looked like she was going to cruise through the first set.
Then Gauff stopped firing at the lines, widening her margins and trying to make Keys move just a little. It worked, passing the error bug onto Keys’ racket. Five games later, Keys had to save a set point on her serve.
And that’s when Keys managed to do the thing every player dreams of doing – playing a perfect point exactly when she needed to. She followed a big first serve with a bigger forehand winner and escaped danger. There was more of that in the tiebreak, with Gauff looking like she was in control, but Keys freeing up to win six of the final eight points, cracking a big first serve to seal it on her second chance.
The second set was the opposite of the first, with Gauff surging out to a lead on the strength of Keys’ errors, than losing her form and her 4-1, double-service break lead. She found her control of the ball just in time, breaking Keys with some deft slicing to move ahead 5-4, and then watching Keys make errors on three consecutive returns to send the match to a deciding set.
“I just knew I had to be able to run today and when the ball came short punish her for it,” Gauff said on court.
With the stage set for a similar tussle to decide the match, Keys returned to the court apparently struggling to shake the idea that her best chance might have slipped away. Just when Gauff had looked like she was going to slip off a cliff, Keys had thrown her a rope, and now Gauff sensed she could use it to reel Keys in.
Keys gave Gauff an early break with an error-strewn game. Gauff, her serve jitters easing and her first-ball percentage climbing toward 60 percent, seized another 4-1 lead with a big looping backhand onto a deep stretch of sideline that Keys couldn’t handle. Unlike the first two sets, that double-break looked secure, rather than vulnerable.
Now the only question was whether she could deal with the adversity once more. She did, playing high-margin tennis and not allowing Keys to think a wobble was just a few bad swings away, as it had been throughout the match.
Gauff got to match point with a nifty short slice forehand and an easy down the line pass, then sealed it with one more steady rally that ended with her watching Keys send a last forehand long. She will play world No. 6 Mirra Andreeva or French wild card Loïs Boisson in the semifinals.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Tennis, Women's Tennis
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