US Open Day 5 - Is Coco Gauff the title favourite?

**Catherine Whitaker** (0:10)
Hello, and welcome to The Tennis Podcast, recording tonight alongside The Player Practice Courts on what has been a pretty thrilling day five of the US Open. I'm Catherine Whitaker, alongside David Law and Matt Roberts. As always, together, we are The Tennis Podcast here in New York to bring you daily shows from the US Open and all four majors of the tennis season. It is shortly before 10 p.m. as we record the majority of this show, and it's still outrageously humid, as it has been all day here in New York. There are still a couple of matches still to be completed, and rest assured, we will be back in part three to cover off top seed Alexander Zverev, taking on Conta Alice on ash, and Elena Raback in his latest fitness test against Jessica Boutas-Muniero, that it's about to kick off on Armstrong. In the first match on ash tonight, we saw tournament favorite Coco Gauff come through a battle, a big battle against former world number two Paula Badosa, 6'4, 7'6. Matt, you were up in the stands for this. You described it as a vibe.

**Matt Roberts** (1:17)
It was a vibe, particularly after the match, actually, when everyone was high on the Coco Gauff win, and then there was a pride night light show, which I did find myself thinking, God, this is good. This is a vibe. They're playing some absolute bangers. But then I caught myself and was like, oh, it is also Faff. It's really pulling me in different directions.

**Catherine Whitaker** (1:38)
Do you know, Matt, it is tough when the Faff is good.

**Matt Roberts** (1:41)
This is great.

**Catherine Whitaker** (1:42)
Why is it happening at 10 p.m.? And we've got a best of five set match to come. Like, I want to be able to enjoy this, but it's competing with my heart that says.
But like, do it at 7 p.m. Like, there was three hours of intentionally blank. There's time for the fun light show and the bangers. And the time is not 10 p.m. But I'm glad you had a good time. Did Coco Gauff have a good time? How good did she need to be to beat Paula Badosa tonight?

**Matt Roberts** (2:11)
Yeah. And I'm interested in your takes on this, having seen it from a different vantage point to me. I thought it was a really good match. I really enjoyed this one. And Badosa came out firing, you know, middling the ball, really going after her shots and was putting Coco Gauff under pressure repeatedly on serve in the early stages. Gauff was rising to that pressure and holding firm. And then Gauff was the one who actually got the first break and won the first set and went up a break in the second and seemed to have the match under total control, really. Playing well, I thought, without being absolutely incredible.
But then a couple more occasions where Badosa just went for broke and broke back once and then got broken and then broke back again, just going after it on the return and really did put Gauff under pressure there and she had to rise to it. And I think you could see from her reaction after she got through that second set tie break just how much she was pushed today and how close this match was to going to a deciding set. And overall, I thought pretty good performance from Gauff. You know, her numbers were very clean in terms of, you know, a decent, you know, a similar number of winners and unforced errors, put under a lot of pressure from an opponent who has played well against her in the past. She talked about some nerves with playing that night session again and, you know, bearing in mind all of that this early in the tournament to be pushed that hard in a set, I think Gauff did well to come through it in straight sets.

**Catherine Whitaker** (3:52)
Especially given, we think she might be struggling just a little bit with some kind of illness, a cold, maybe.

**David Law** (4:00)
Yeah, that's what she was overheard saying on the TV broadcast. It was picked up by the commentators. She was overheard saying that to the communications staff representative, who would have been organizing her next couple of hours, press conferences, one-to-one TV interviews, et cetera. She did her interview with Chris Eubanks on the court.
No discussion of that, but I did sort of look at her and think, she is a bit glazed over, you know. She does look a little bit under the weather here. I don't think it affected her performance in a sort of visible way. To answer your question about our vantage point, I thought she played really well, and I think she was pushed to the limit by an opponent who has got truly destructive, withering power when she connects and lands properly. And I felt this was on a bit of a knife edge when she went into that tie break second set, because we didn't expect one to come.