U.S. Open: Naomi Osaka's win over Coco Gauff shows she's ready to be contender again
Naomi Osaka hits ball back to Coco Gauff during their U.S. Open fourth-round match at Arthur Ashe Stadium on Monday. Credit: Errol Anderson
Naomi Osaka did it again.
Six years after beating 15-year-old Coco Gauff in straight sets in front of a sellout crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium, Osaka turned in another dominating performance against Gauff on Monday, knocking the most popular player at the U.S. Open out of the tournament with a 6-3, 6-2 victory.
Deja vu? Well, not exactly.
A lot of years and a lot of life have passed since the last time the two players met on Arthur Ashe court, with each having taken a different journey to this rematch.
This time it was the 21-year-old Gauff who was considered the favorite. The highest-paid women’s athlete in the world for two straight years, she entered the match ranked No. 3 in the world, having added a second Grand Slam title at the French Open to the one she won here in 2023.
This time it was the 27-year-old Osaka who needed a victory here the most. Osaka, ranked 23rd, hadn’t made it to the quarterfinals of a Grand Slam tournament since 2021, when she won the Australian Open. In the interim, she had taken significant time off to deal with mental health issues and then a 17-month maternity leave after the birth of her daughter, Shai, in July 2023.
Osaka wielded the same kind of mental toughness, big serves and booming strokes that made her a force earlier in her career, carrying her to four major championships, all on hard courts. She won the U.S. Open in 2018 and 2020 and the Australian Open in 2019 and 2021.
Osaka took control from the start, breaking Gauff in the opening game. Gauff’s recent struggles with her serve have been well documented, as has the fact that she took a big gamble to fix it by changing coaches just days before the start of the U.S. Open.
In this loss, which took only 64 minutes, her problems were not limited to her serve, though. She finished the match with 33 unforced errors and only eight winners. She failed to take Osaka to a single break point.
“She seemed relaxed out there,” Gauff said. “Today, she definitely was on paper the underdog . . . But yeah, she’s playing great tennis. Today I thought she played well. She forced me to play how I did today. I think she’s improved a lot since coming back.”
Though Gauff is the most popular player at the U.S. Open and the woman everyone clearly wanted to win, the crowd showed appreciation for the journey Osaka has taken and the fact that she has a chance to again become a major player in the women’s game.
Two years ago, Osaka, still on maternity leave, was in the stands of the U.S. Open watching Gauff make her title run. Now she is in the quarterfinals of a Grand Slam tournament for the fifth time in her career. In the previous four, she went on to win the title.
Her win over Gauff suddenly makes her a player with whom to be reckoned. Her appearance in the quarterfinals will put Osaka back in the top 20 of the WTA rankings for the first time since the fall of 2021.
Osaka’s next opponent is No. 13 Karolina Muchova. If she finds a way to win her third U.S. Open title, it will vault her into the top 10.
After her win over Gauff, it was clear that Osaka just wanted to soak in the moment.
“I’m a little sensitive and I don’t want to cry, but I had so much fun out here,” she said in a post-match interview. “I really wanted an opportunity to come out here and play. This is my favorite court in the world. It means so much to me to be back here.”
Osaka’s fun didn’t end there.
In an ironic twist for a player who sometimes has skipped news conferences, she even seemed to enjoy that part of the day. As she walked into a crowded auditorium for her post-match conference, Osaka stopped, pulled out a phone and took a picture of reporters to document the moment.
“Just to be playing a match that you guys seem to have talked about a lot leading into it is also really fun,” Osaka said. “Yeah, I think this is like the moments that I play tennis for.”
Moments that she seems to appreciate more the second time around.
Barbara Barker is an award-winning columnist and features writer in the sports department at Newsday. She has covered sports in New York for more than 20 years.
