Garcia, the No. 17 seed from France, beat the 18-year-old American, who was playing her first quarterfinal at the U.S. Open, in straight sets.
So how do you say steamroller in French?
It is a fine time to find out because nothing has been able to stop Caroline Garcia of late: Not even the rising American Coco Gauff and a packed partisan crowd in Arthur Ashe Stadium.
Garcia, a 28-year-old from the French city of Lyon, did not appear unsettled in the least on Tuesday.
In her first night-session appearance in the biggest stadium in tennis, Garcia swept the first four games of this U.S. Open quarterfinal in just 17 minutes to take quick command and then rumbled to a 6-3, 6-4 victory with timely serving, deft volleys and big baseline hitting that routinely paid dividends.
“It was super important to get a quick start,” said Garcia, concerned about keeping the latest sellout crowd of 23,859 at Ashe from making her life more difficult.
“That was the goal,” she said. “That crowd can get fired up very quickly.”
Garcia subdued them by playing the same brand of aggressive, attacking tennis that had carried her to 12 straight victories this summer.
Make it 13.
“I just go for my shots, even when I’m stressed and don’t feel it,” she said in her on-court interview after the match. “The way to improve for me is to move forward, and I just try to flow that way.”
While Gauff, 18, did manage to narrow the gap after Garcia’s opening salvo, she could never manage to stop Garcia’s momentum. A Gauff run to the title here this year would have had powerful narrative arc. Gauff, a Black prodigy from Florida, was inspired to take up the game by the success of the Williams sisters, and Serena Williams, soon to celebrate her 41st birthday, played what was likely her final official match last week in a third-round defeat in Queens.
This would have been quite the time for a torch passing, and Gauff may well run with it someday. But despite reaching the French Open final in June, she still needs to shore up some aspects of her big game. She remains prone to double faults and had six more on Tuesday as she won just 27 percent of her second-serve points.
Ranked No. 1 in doubles, Gauff has a terrific net game but is still learning to make the right choices on when to push forward. She also made too many unforced errors from the baseline, leaning back as she tried to counter Garcia’s percussive strokes and often getting unsettled by the pace.
Gauff had beaten Garcia in their previous two singles matches, but Garcia and her doubles partner, the Frenchwoman Kristina Mladenovic, defeated Gauff and Jessica Pegula in the French Open women’s doubles final in June: a victory that helped relaunch Garcia. Ranked outside the top 70 in singles after Roland Garros, she has simplified her approach with great success under the coach Bertrand Perret. It is grip-it-and-rip-it tennis, designed to overwhelm the opposition, but there is also great technical skill and timing involved as she stands sometimes three steps inside the baseline to smack returns.
“I would say she’s definitely striking the ball much better,” Gauff said. “Kudos to her, and her team because I think she’s gotten a lot better since the last time I played her.”
It was the first U.S. Open quarterfinal in singles for both players, and now Garcia, seeded 17th but playing much better than that, will face Perret’s former pupil Ons Jabeur in her first Grand Slam semifinal on Thursday.
“Of course he knows her well, but that goes back a few years now,” Garcia said. “Everybody knows everybody on tour. I’m not sure he is a secret weapon. I think our main goal will be to see how I can put my game in place.”
Jabeur, a Tunisian seeded fifth, advanced earlier on Tuesday by stopping Ajla Tomljanovic’s run in the quarterfinals by 6-4, 7-6 (4).
Tomljanovic, an unseeded Australian who is based in Florida, recorded the biggest victory of her career when she defeated Williams in a gripping, emotional three-setter on Friday night.
She then, to her credit, backed that up by defeating Liudmila Samsonova of Russia in the fourth round, but in her return to Ashe Stadium she could not win a set against Jabeur, who reached the Wimbledon final in July, delighting the Centre Court crowd along the way with her acrobatic footwork and taste for drop shots.
Jabeur, like Garcia, is 28, and they have known each other since their junior days, some of which Jabeur spent based in France. They are on friendly terms and speak French together, but they have never faced each other in a match of this import.
“It’s a big challenge in front of me,” Garcia said. “We go back a long way, and she has a special game that you don’t often see on the tour. She has had a solid year and has that experience now in these big matches like Wimbledon. So it’s going to be very interesting to see how we can find a solution to counter her.”
Garcia, long considered a promising junior in France, put herself on a bigger map early at age 17 by going up a set and 4-1 on the Russian superstar Maria Sharapova in the second round of the 2011 French Open. The British star Andy Murray, who follows women’s tennis closely, tweeted during the match that “the girl Sharapova is playing is going to be No. 1 in the world one day.”
That was quite a leap of faith, and Sharapova eventually came back to win. Garcia, flattered by Murray’s comment but not remotely ready to start living up to it, needed more time. She reached No. 4 in the world in 2018 before fading. But she has roared back this summer and now has six straight victories over top-20 players after losing the previous 12.
She was asked on Tuesday night if Murray, despite his good intentions, had hurt her with his grand prediction.
“Yes,” she said with a grin. “I’m very happy that he thought that at the time, but I was 17 and ranked 150 or 200, and I was capable of producing this level for a match but not capable to produce it other weeks. At first, I put pressure on myself, saying I wanted to play like that, and that’s when things went wrong.”
Not much has gone awry in New York. It is no easy task to overpower Gauff, one of the best defenders and quickest movers on the women’s tour. Gauff will break into the top 10 in singles next week for the first time.
“She is of course very fast,” Garcia said of Gauff in an interview on the eve of the match. “But my game can negate that, because I am not looking to get in too many long rallies.”
So it turned out. The average rally length was 3.53 shots. After winning the title as a qualifier at the Western and Southern Open in Mason, Ohio, last month, Garcia has not come close to dropping a set in five matches at the U.S. Open.
And in case you’re still curious, steamroller in French is rouleau compresseur.
Source: Tennis - nytimes.com
