Coco Gauff, it turns out, was the player to slow down Mirra Andreeva

The tennis calendar is long, but it isn’t monotonous. These days, especially on the women’s side, every month can feel like a new season, with an entirely different dynamic.

In February and March, Mirra Andreeva appeared unstoppable. The Russian teenager was winning 1000-level tournaments, beating the top-ranked players and looking like a possible favorite at the rest of this year’s majors. She had already reached a Roland Garros semifinal. Who was going to stop her from going all the way this year?

It didn’t take long to find an answer: Coco Gauff, the game’s former most famous teen prodigy, has taken the wind out of Andreeva’s sails in Madrid and Rome.

While Gauff is ranked third in the world, she didn’t seem to be the most likely candidate to knock Andreeva off her new pedestal. In February and March, the American was as bad as the Russian was good, failing to make the quarters at four events on her favored hard courts. But like I said, every month, every shift in surface, can feel like a new season in tennis. Two weeks ago, Gauff beat Andreeva in Madrid, 7-5, 6-1, and she beat her again in Rome, 6-4, 7-6 (5), on Wednesday, to run her record to 4-0 in their head-to-head.

How has Gauff mastered Andreeva? In Rome, she did it by calmly turning her usual liabilities, her serve and forehand, into weapons. She didn’t have a double fault in the first set, and was broken just once. In the rallies, she struck her forehand cleanly, with far fewer shanks than we saw earlier this year, and pushed Andreeva around with the type of heavy topspin that works so well on dirt. You know Gauff’s game is clicking when she has 11 forehand winners by the end of the first set.

This being Coco, there was defense to go with her offense. She forces Andreeva to play with a little more risk, and a little closer to the lines than she normally does. For a set and a half, this left Andreeva frustrated, and in what she might call her “brat mode.” But with some prodding from her coach, Conchita Martinez—“You have to play!”—the teen found a reserve of positive energy, and found the corners with her shots. The two traded winners, and love holds, down the stretch in the second set.

In the deciding tiebreaker, though, Gauff just made life a little too hard. She won the first point with a forehand pass, the second with a towering defensive lob, and took a 4-3 lead with a neatly carved slice forehand winner. Most important, when Andreeva tied it back up at 5-5 with a spectacular forehand drop, Gauff came right back and won the next point with a confident pair of forehands. At match point, she made Andreeva hit one more shot, and it went long.

“At the end my defense, it was tough,” Gauff said. “We were both kind of tight at the end of that tiebreaker.”

Whoever can make one more ball in the court.

In tennis, life can come at you fast, as we used to say. Over the past two months, Gauff and Andreeva have essentially switched places in the Roland Garros pecking order. Now it’s Coco who looks calm and purposeful, and it’s Andreeva who bashed a ball out into the upper deck in raging frustration today.

For Coco, it was her ability to manufacture a win in the end that mattered most.

“A lot of confidence heading in [to the semifinals],” she said of her Thursday matchup with either Aryna Sabalenka or Zheng Qinwen. “Today some points weren’t my best, but I still managed to be successful.”