United Cup
Fritz saves MP to draw USA level after Spain’s Bouzas Maneiro stuns Gauff
Harrison/Gauff playing Cervantes/Cavalle-Reimers in deciding mixed
January 06, 2026
Janelle St Pierre/Getty Images
Taylor Fritz in action on Monday at the United Cup in Perth.
By ATP/WTA Staff
World No. 9 Taylor Fritz saved a match point in a do-or-die clash with Jaume Munar Monday to keep alive USA’s hopes of winning Group A at the United Cup in Perth.
Taking the court after Coco Gauff’s shock three-set loss to Jessica Bouzas Maneiro, Fritz knew that the two-time champion would not win Group A if he dropped his second match of the tournament, following his opening-round defeat to Sebastian Baez.
Seeing his first break points of the match at 5-6 in the third, Fritz failed to convert both match point opportunities and later saved a match point on his serve in the tie-break before winning 7-6(4), 3-6, 7-6(6) in three hours and 14 minutes.
“It was a crazy match,” Fritz said. “I thought Jaume played very well. I felt I was in a lot of his service games but he played so well on so many of the big points.
“I had to come up with a lot to keep myself in the match or convert any of the big points. It was really tough, really physical.”
Fritz took a seven-minute medical time-out at 4-all in the third set to treat a bloodied toe after a long slide chasing a drop shot. He saved a break point in the following game.
The United States will win the group if it can clinch the tie-deciding mixed doubles. Should it lose the mixed doubles, Argentina will advance to the quarter-finals as Group A winner, with the United States guaranteed to finish runner-up.
The three group winners in Perth advance to the quarter-finals, with the fourth spot reserved for one group runner-up with the best record.
Fritz will hope for a repeat of last year’s United Cup run, when after also dropping his opening-round match, he won four straight to guide the Americans to their second title in three years.
Fritz came into the tournament after intensive rehab in the offseason on his knee for what he described as “pretty serious tendonitis”. But he didn’t give an inch to Munar in a series of lengthy baseline exchanges. He also fired 16 aces to add to the 22 against Baez.
“The knee is something I’m going to be dealing with for a while,” he said. “… I started feeling it towards the end of the first set but it didn’t get any worse. Typically I start feeling it and it gets worse and worse and worse until I can’t even bend it. So I’m really happy with the fact that it stayed at the level it was at and it wasn’t bad enough to stop me from playing through.”
Jessica Bouzas Maneiro is coming off a breakout 2025 season in which she set a career-high ranking of No. 40, reached the fourth round of a Grand Slam for the first time at Wimbledon and made her first WTA 1000 quarterfinal in Montreal.
On Monday at the United Cup, the Spaniard carried that momentum into 2026, upsetting World No. 4 Coco Gauff in dominant fashion, 6-1, 6-7 (3), 6-0 at RAC Arena. The loss is Gauff’s first at the United Cup in 10 matches across singles and doubles; she entered the day 6-0 in singles and 9-0 overall.
The win marks Bouzas Maneiro’s first career Top-5 victory.
“I know Coco and she’s a fighter,” Bouzas Maneiro said after the match. “She’s there all the time in the match, so I knew that I had to be there, and even if I’m 4-1 up, I have to be there. And yeah, she won the second set and I went to the bathroom and I was trying to focus just to take it point by point.
“And that was my mentality in the third set. To be [there] with power every point because even if you are [up] 3-0 or 4-0, you have to be ready.”
Bouzas Maneiro set the tone immediately, breaking Gauff in the opening game en route to a 5-0 lead. She went on to break the American in all four of her service games in the first set and nine times overall.
Her forehand — which produced 11 winners in the match — fueled her early surge, but her return game, paired with Gauff’s serving struggles, defined the rest of the match. It was a stark contrast to Gauff’s dominant performance earlier in the week against Argentina’s Solana Sierra.
Gauff landed just 60% of her first serves and won just under 60% of those points. She was further undone by 14 double faults and 54 unforced errors. Bouzas Maneiro could only match Gauff’s first-serve numbers but managed her unforced errors more effectively (41) and converted 9 of 12 break points.
Still, Gauff refused to go quietly despite her struggles. She rallied from 4-1 down to take the second set in a tiebreak and appeared poised for a remarkable comeback. But Bouzas Maneiro broke to open the decider and never looked back, racing to a 4-0 lead after saving two break points in a five-deuce game.
After 2 hours and 12 minutes, Bouzas Maneiro closed out the match with a third-set bagel, earning a bit of redemption after being blanked in a deciding set by Sierra earlier in the week, and secured the biggest win of her career.