Cristina Bucsa and Coco Gauff thrilled Arthur Ashe Stadium on Saturday with several all-court exchanges that showed off both players’ extensive shot-making repertoires.<\/p>\n
No. 40-ranked Bucsa took an early break lead, and serving at 3-2, deuce, came up with something special as she sought to consolidate it. After exchanging baseline blows for 18 shots, the Spaniard — a doubles bronze medalist at the Paris Olympic Games — broke the rally open with a canny charge to the net and a delicate drop volley. But Gauff’s speed up to seemingly lost causes can never be underestimated — and once she got to the forecourt, the point morphed into a brilliant cat-and-mouse exchange of volleys and angles. Gauff was the player who managed to get a backhand volley deep in the court first — but Bucsa managed to spring back to the baseline and pull off a superb forehand pass down the line.<\/p>\n
As the commentator put it, “one of the best points you’ll see all tournament.”<\/p>\n
Despite losing the point, No. 4 seed Gauff still managed to break Bucsa back and go on to take the first set. At 2-2 in the second set, it was the American’s turn to come out on top of a touch battle. A lucky net cord gave Gauff the advantage in the rally as Bucsa was forced to sprint up to net to track it down — but the 28-year-old found an excellent counter-drop to get out of trouble, then pulled off a pinpoint lob to get on the front foot again. A ruthless Gauff forced Bucsa to sprint up to the forecourt again to retrieve a drop shot, and this time the former champion was ready to wrong-foot her opponent with a delightfully angled cross-court pass.<\/p>\n
Gauff went on to win 6-3, 6-4 to set an all-American fourth-round meeting with No. 14 seed Iva Jovic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cristina Bucsa and Coco Gauff thrilled Arthur Ashe Stadium on Saturday with several all-court exchanges that showed off…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66928,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[33,463],"class_list":["post-66927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-us-open","tag-text","tag-us-open"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66927"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66927\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}