Coco Gauff ends Caroline Wozniacki fairytale to storm into US Open last eight

Coco Gauff’s storming summer continued as she marched into the quarter-finals of the US Open, ending the romantic story of Caroline Wozniacki’s comeback slam tournament along the way.

Wozniacki was trying to emulate Kim Clijsters’s fairytale from the 2009 US Open – which saw the 32-year-old win the first major she played after retiring, starting a family, and then realising that she still had a yen for elite competition.

At 33, Wozniacki is now at the final stage of the same journey. And she performed more than respectably here, taking out the two-time Wimbledon champion Petra Kvitova on the way to the last 16.

Unfortunately, Wozniacki’s game lacks the explosiveness that allowed Clijsters to pull off that unforgettable victory 14 years ago. A victory which, ironically, Clijsters completed by beating a 19-year-old Wozniacki in the final.

Long-time tennis fans may remember that, when Wozniacki reached No 1 in the world, she did it by being a long-distance specialist: the sort of player who grinds down their opponents with physicality and grit.

Yet such qualities are never likely to make much impact on Gauff, who notched her 15th win from 16 attempts since Wimbledon via a 6-3, 3-6, 6-1 scoreline. While Gauff might have a few technical gremlins to worry about, she is as fine an athlete as this game has ever produced, and she matched Wozniacki’s silky movement with even more spectacular court coverage of her own.

“Caroline’s back and it’s like she’s never left,” said the 19-year-old Gauff of Wozniacki, who has had two children since she retired three-and-a-half years ago. “It’s a little bit weird, because I grew up watching Caroline. I remember watching her win the Australian Open when everybody was saying all sorts of things about her [primarily that she wouldn’t be a worthy world No 1 until she won a major]. So to be up here on court with her was an honour.”

So what of Gauff? She started and finished strongly, yet the way she faltered in the second set was yet another reminder that she has an Achilles forehand. That shot had been running so smoothly early on that she kept taking it up the line with apparent confidence, using it to spread the court and overpower Wozniacki. But when it goes, it really goes.

The very first point of the second set found Gauff slapping a routine crosscourt forehand wide. Here was the first of 16 unforced forehand errors in just one set – an avalanche of misses which made up almost half of Wozniacki’s points. In the decider, a chastened Gauff was reduced to rolling the ball in more conservatively, but it didn’t really matter as Wozniacki was by now beginning to tire.

Gauff’s new coach Brad Gilbert – author of the hacker’s bible Winning Ugly – has transformed her results by encouraging her not to focus on her forehand deficiencies. But until she finds a way of preventing this shot from breaking down under pressure, it is still hard to imagine her holding up the trophy here on Saturday night.