A WTA Tour Finals showdown between Coco Gauff and Aryna Sabalenka with a spot in the semifinals on the line seemed like a pretty tasty offering.
They hadn’t played since the French Open final, when Gauff came back from a set down to scramble Sabalenka’s brain – with some help from a swirling wind – and walked off with her second Grand Slam title. Then, in one of the lower moments of her career, Sabalenka unloaded — first in her loser’s speech and then in her post-match news conference, saying the only reason that Gauff won was because Sabalenka had played terribly in horrid conditions.
Thursday night’s rematch held the promise of revenge going both ways. Until round-robin math intruded, flattening what could have been another classic and sending Sabalenka onto the semi-finals with a 7-6(5), 6-2 win over the world No. 3 and defending champion.
“I love getting revenge,” Sabalenka said in her news conference after the match.
For 10 months, no one in tennis cares about how many games a player needs to win a match. They can win 18 of of 32 games and still lose.
Then the Tour Finals roll around, and suddenly the difference between advancing and going home can come down to a percentage of games won over three matches. It’s the sort of calculation that is reasonably impossible to keep in the brain while trying to beat one of the other seven best players in the sport.
If Gauff had won on Thursday, she, Sabalenka and Jessica Pegula all would have finished the round-robin with a 2-1 record. The first tiebreak in that scenario is head-to-head record, then sets won, then game percentage won.
The way it worked out, Gauff essentially had to beat Sabalenka in straight sets to advance. She could do it in three, but it would require a faintly absurd scoreline — a close set going Sabalenka’s way, either before or in between two beatdowns from the American.
Gauff started the mission firing. The usual shakiness with her first serve was gone. She tagged forehand after forehand with a brutal efficiency, as she so often does against Sabalenka and world No. 2 Iga Świątek, embracing the freedom of being the relative underdog in a matchup.
She broke Sabalenka in the first game, then again in the fifth. Leading 4-2, she got three more break points by out-slugging the biggest slugger in the sport. But then Sabalenka’s serve caught fire and lifted her out of trouble, before she broke Gauff with the American having been two points from winning the first set.
Two games later, Gauff was 4-2 up in a first-set tiebreak with a short backhand for a 5-2 lead. She stuffed it into the net. Then came a double fault at the worst moment to give Sabalenka set point, which she took with a forehand winner. Gauff now needed two one-sided sets, which isn’t how a player usually thinks about winning a three-setter. In any other competition, the 21-year-old would slough off the disappointment and dig in for a marathon. Instead, the scenario required a sprint from a standing start.
She was down 0-4 in about 12 minutes, and managed just two more games in her final match of a long season.
“I had a lot of chances in the first set, so, it was a bit disappointing not to get that one,” Gauff said in a news conference. “A couple of points in the tiebreak I had literally on my racket, so yeah, it was a tough one.”
Sabalenka’s win sets up another opportunity for revenge, this time for her opponent, Amanda Anisimova. Pegula will take on Elena Rybakina, the in-form player at the event who has won nine completed matches in a row and has been whipping balls at the lines and into the corners with abandon.
“We all know how she can play, huge game, big serve, I think these conditions definitely suit her,” Pegula said of Rybakina. “It seems like she’s hitting every single mark.”
Sabalenka and Anisimova have played two massive matches this year, with Anisimova getting the better of Sabalenka in the Wimbledon semi-final and Sabalenka getting her revenge in the U.S. Open final. They’ve been trading wins since the start of 2024.
That would suggest it’s Anisimova’s turn, but that’s not exactly how this rivalry works these days. It’s usually a couple of points either way.
“A lot of great matches, a lot of great battles, and I’m super happy to see her healthy, competing, playing her best tennis,” Sabalenka said of Anisimova. “I’m really excited to be facing her.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Tennis, Women’s Tennis
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