Coco Gauff blends aggression with margin to defuse Dayana Yastremska at Roland Garros

When I imagined this match beforehand, I pictured Dayana Yastremska belting balls into the corners and Coco Gauff slipping and sliding from side to side to track as many down as she could.

There was some of that. Yastremska basically only knows one gear for her strokes—fifth—and Gauff’s natural tendency is to use her speed and stamina to defend.

But Coco is also trying to do more than that these days. At 20, with guidance from Brad Gilbert, she has been making a long-term transition from a defensive- to an offensive-minded player, to someone who uses her superior athleticism to step in and attack, as well as scramble and retrieve. There will be bumps in that road, but the destination, they hope, will be worth the effort. Gauff says she regrets getting caught up in her results when she was younger.

“I think I got down on myself when I lost a lot,” Gauff says of her early years on tour. “And I’m just, like, ‘You were so young,’ and I’m still young, but you were definitely super young then, and you’re still developing. Yeah, I try to just keep to continue to develop as a player. Sometimes that ends in some losses, but I think in the long run it will be important.”

The American’s eventual 6-2, 6-4 win over the Ukrainian was a good illustration of where she stands in that transition. She did the smart thing and the natural thing against a player as erratic as Yastremska: She played with safety, hit the ball through the middle of the court, and forced her opponent to aim close to the lines to win points. Gauff hit just eight winners, while Yastremska made 38 unforced errors.

“I thought I played pretty well today,” Gauff said. “I was just trying to be solid. She’s a very aggressive player who can hit winners and also make mistakes, so I was just trying to be solid and be aggressive when I could.”

As she says, she didn’t win this match with defense alone. She stood up at the baseline and slugged with Yastremska. She went after her first serve, and disarmed her opponent by firing it into her body. While she made just 47 percent of her first serves, she won 73 percent of those points and was broken just twice. Rather than decelerate on her second serve, which she does when she’s tight, she accelerated through it with confidence.

Most of the time, anyway. Down 6-2, 5-2, Yastremska predictably began to swing with more freedom, while Gauff, equally predictably, tightened up and threw in a double fault that landed at the bottom of the net. Yastremska got one of the breaks back, and nearly got the second as well, but Gauff dug in at 5-4, put up a brick wall at the baseline, and earned a final hold.

Gauff, who beat Yastremska in Madrid last month, said she was ready for a run from her at the end.

“She plays really well from behind, so I knew closing the match out would be difficult,” she said. “I was just trying to just remind myself I’m in the better position. I’m the one up a set and double break.”

The next question for Gauff may be: Can she win Roland Garros while making just 47 percent of her first serves? Possibly not. But as I wrote above, every match she plays is part of her transition and her progression. This one felt like a step forward. We’ll see if she can make a couple more before the fortnight is over.