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She will play 2019 semi-finalist Elina
Svitolina of Ukraine in the next round.
"I have really nothing to lose," said Gauff, who credited her
team with helping her stay relaxed under the pressure of the
year's final major.
"I think we just treat it like practice, at the end of the day.
We have fun before and after matches."
Gauff was red hot as she broke Maria in the opening game but
helped her opponent to a break point with a handful of clumsy
errors in the next game.
The third seed hardly had the run-up to New York that she had
hoped for as she exited Toronto and Cincinnati early, and she
appeared visibly frustrated at times as she put up 20 unforced
errors and seven double faults in the first set.
She turned it around when she broke her opponent from the
baseline in the seventh game and clawed her way back from 15-40
in the 10th.
A technical error caused the loudspeaker at Arthur Ashe Stadium
to blare the word "stop," forcing the players to replay set
point, but Gauff was not rattled and had a poker face as she
walked back to her bench.
Maria dropped her serve with a double fault in the first game of
the second set and Gauff forced the German into an error to make
it 3-0, as a handful of mid-match adjustments paid off.
She started coming to the net more, catching Maria off-guard as
she improved virtually every aspect of her game, running away
with the match to wild applause from the home crowd.
(Reporting by Amy Tennery in New York; Editing by Muralikumar
Anantharaman and Peter Rutherford) [© 2024 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.]
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