Coco Gauff Battles Back Against Andreeva to Set Up Rybakina Semi-Final

For 26 brutal minutes, Coco Gauff looked like a defending champion on her way out of her own party.

Her serve misfired, her forehand sprayed, and Mirra Andreeva – the teenage French Open champion with ice in her veins and weight in her groundstrokes – tore through the opening set 6-2. Gauff managed just three winners and piled up 14 unforced errors. The Arthur Ashe crowd, ready for a coronation, watched a crisis instead.

Then the match turned into something else entirely.

From unraveling to reset

Gauff’s start bordered on catastrophic. First serves drifted long or sat up to be punished, short forehands died in the net, and Andreeva, unfazed by the occasion, simply kept asking questions. The Russian fifth seed played clean, early, and bold. Gauff had no answers.

She found some in the second set, not in a surge of brilliance, but in stubborn resistance. The rallies grew longer. The errors shrank. The crowd sensed she needed help and responded with volume. Gauff clawed her way into service games she had no right to touch and dragged the set into a tie-break.

That is where Andreeva should have finished the job.

Twice she stood a point from the semi-finals. Twice she blinked. A loose error here, a tentative swing there, and the door Gauff had been kicking at finally gave way. The American snatched the breaker 9-7, and with it, the match’s emotional core.

On the changeover, Andreeva’s frustration boiled over. She hurled her racket toward her chair; it skidded off course, spinning toward a nearby camera operator, who had to step aside quickly. It was a flash of temper that underlined how close she had come – and how quickly the night was slipping away.

From that moment, only one player looked like she believed.

Gauff, who later admitted she had gone to the restroom after the first set thinking about Frances Tiafoe’s comeback the previous day, returned with a different presence. She stopped chasing perfection and started chasing balls. She stopped fearing the miss and trusted the swing.

The scoreline told the story of that shift: 2-6, 7-6 (7), 6-2.

Heart over polish

This was not Gauff at her cleanest. It was Gauff at her toughest.

Her level fluctuated wildly, but when the match tightened, she refused to let it go. Marion Bartoli, watching for Sky Sports, distilled it simply: this was “pure heart to find a way, somehow.” The former Wimbledon champion pointed out the truth that matters most in the second week of a Slam: no one rewinds to examine the quality of a quarter-final performance if you end up holding the trophy.

Tim Henman saw the same tension from both sides of the net. Two brilliant ball-strikers, reduced at times to nervy, looping exchanges as the ball speed dropped and the errors crept in. The match became less about shot-making and more about nerve. Keep the ball “on the island,” cut out the mistakes, survive the moment.

Gauff did. Andreeva, for all her talent and composure at 17, did not – not this time.

For the Russian, it will sting. Match points in a US Open quarter-final against the defending champion are the kind of chances that can haunt a player for months. Henman called it a “very difficult defeat” to absorb, but also one that will accelerate her education. She has already shown she belongs on these stages. Nights like this harden that belief, even in defeat.

For Gauff, it’s something else entirely: another notch in the growing catalogue of matches she wins not because she is playing her best tennis, but because she refuses to accept her worst.

Next, she faces the new world No 1.

Rybakina rises to No 1 – and into Gauff’s path

Elena Rybakina had already changed the story of the day before Gauff and Andreeva walked on court.

The 27-year-old from Kazakhstan beat Qinwen Zheng 3-6, 6-1, 6-4 to reach her first US Open semi-final and, with it, secure the top spot in the rankings. On Monday, she will officially end Aryna Sabalenka’s 99-week reign as world No 1.

She did not arrive there in a blaze of perfection. Zheng, on a Raducanu-style surge from the qualifying draw, grabbed the opening set and threatened to stretch Rybakina’s legs and nerves to breaking point. The Chinese 23-year-old had logged nearly 12 hours on court across three qualifying matches and five in the main draw, but she still came out swinging.

Rybakina looked flat early, negative by her own admission, her game littered with unforced errors. Then she recalibrated. The second set was a statement: 6-1, with the Australian Open champion stepping into the court, dictating from the baseline, and suffocating Zheng’s time.

The decider brought tension back. Zheng fought, but the mileage finally told. Rybakina held her nerve, tightened her patterns, and closed the door. Henman praised the way she responded, pointing to her more aggressive positioning and the composure she showed when the third set hung in the balance. That, he said, was where her class shone through.

Rybakina’s reaction to becoming No 1 was telling. No celebration, no grand pronouncements. “It’s just a number right now,” she said. She talked instead about the semi-final, about wanting to win every tournament she enters, about focusing on her game and enjoying what comes next.

What comes next is Gauff.

One, the defending US Open champion, dragged herself off the ropes and roared back from the brink. The other, the new world No 1, absorbed an early hit and methodically turned a dangerous match in her favour.

They meet with a place in the final at stake, one riding the emotion of a great escape, the other carrying the authority of a ranking that confirms what the locker room already knew.

Now the question is simple: whose momentum survives the night?