Gauff into maiden Madrid final, trounces Swiatek
Coco Gauff beat Iga Swiatek to reach the final in Madrid
Coco Gauff in Madrid (Laurent Lairus/PSNewz)
Coco Gauff is into her maiden Mutua Madrid Open final – beating defending champion Iga Swiatek 6-1, 6-1.
This was her third WTA 1000 semi-final on clay, with both previous matches in Rome against Swiatek.
But after a few wobbly matches against the Pole – who won their first seven encounters without dropping a set – Gauff has now won her last four matches against opponents ranked in the top two. One was against Aryna Sabalenka at the WTA Finals – and the other three were all against Swiatek.
It was pretty bad – Swiatek
Gauff has now won the three most recent matches against Swiatek, not dropping a set against her, and must feel the tide has turned. This was the quickest – and most emphatic – of any of their matches, lasting only 64 minutes; it was one minute quicker than Swiatek’s 6-0, 6-3 win in the quarter-finals of San Diego in 2022, and four minutes quicker than her domination of the Roland-Garros final that year, 6-1, 6-3.
Indeed, it is one of Swiatek’s worst losses on tour, second only to her 2019 defeat at the hands of Simona Halep at Roland-Garros, although she has won only two games in a match three times previously – with all three of them also coming in 2019.
“It was all pretty much the same from the beginning to the end,” Swiatek said in her press conference afterwards. “I couldn’t really get my level up. Coco played good, but, yeah, I think it’s, you know, on me that I didn’t really move well, I wasn’t ready to play back the shots with heaviness, and, yeah, with that kind of game like, yeah, it was pretty bad.”
