In the opening win against a playful and poisonous Laura Siegemund, Coco Gauff shows what she has learned from her new advisor Brad Gilbert: not only to defeat opponents in a playful way, but also to defeat them with psychological elements.
You couldn’t ignore these brief messages from Brad Gilbert to Coco Gauff, even if the spectators made a hell of a racket in the world’s largest tennis stadium. Gauff had a hard time against the poisonous and bilious, but also very playful Laura Siegemund. At first they were purely announcements about tennis, i.e. technical (“shoulders straight on the backhand”) and tactical in nature: “After the long forehand, aggressively continue and quickly forward.” At the beginning of the second set, Siegemund had won the first set 6:3 and caused even more tension in the already shaky favorite when Gilbert switched to the Winning Ugly-Mode. “It’s always zero,” said Gilbert about the fact that Siegemund usually took the maximum amount of time (and more) when preparing for rallies: “Tell that to the referee!”