Coco Gauff has struggled recently, which is why former player Andy Roddick doesn't think she'll be able to get past Elina Svitolina in the third round of the 2024 US Open.
The American will experience something that she's never experienced before in her career at the upcoming US Open. She will enter a Grand Slam as the defending champion.
She won the US Open last year, but many top analysts don't think that she'll be able to do the same thing as last year. While she entered last year's US Open among the favorites due to her amazing level at the time, that's not the case this year.
Her last win came in Toronto over Yafan Wang. Since then, she has lost badly to Diana Shnaider and Yulia Putintseva. While losses like that can happen, a player of Gauff's caliber is certainly expected to win those matches.
She's expected to win her upcoming match against Varvara Gravcheva in the first round of the tournament, but Andy Roddick doesn't expect her to win many matches in New York this year.
In his most recent episode of the Served with Andy Roddick podcast, he did a bracket challenge for the US Open. In that bracket challenge, Roddick predicted Gauff would be out before the quarter-finals.
In fact, according to him, she won't even make the fourth round, because he thinks she will be beaten in the third by Elina Svitolina.
"This next one, I don’t like doing it. All cards on the table, I have a bias towards Coco Gauff but I still have to try to be objective. I like Svitolina to round three, I like Coco to round three, I think I like Svitolina to round four."
It's a surprising pick in some ways because Gauff has generally had a favorable matchup with Svitolina. She bested her earlier this year in the ASB Classic final. However, as Roddick would go on to explain, he values current form over anything else.
Svitolina has looked and played better recently. Winning matches isn't foreign to her either because she made the semi-final at Flushing Meadows in 2019. She also made the quarter-final in 2021, even though last year she finished in the third round.
"I’d love to be wrong. Again, I value current form and Coco is searching. She would probably tell you she’s searching. I haven’t talked to Brad in a month but I gotta think they know that. I don’t know if I can put Coco through to the quarters."
Roddick referenced last year's season and how strongly she came into the US Open. Things haven't looked that good for her recently, and while she could win a couple of matches, he doesn't think she could challenge for the title this year because she hasn't shown the capability to do so in the past few weeks.
"What I do know is, it was easy to choose her last year because wins were behind her, she was playing great. She just hasn’t found… Great players go through stages where they’re searching for it."
"When she is searching for it specifically, how you approach going after her game is pretty straightforward if she’s not on. So, I don’t think she’s going to make the quarters."
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