A night session that never turned
Iva Jovic had beaten Alexandra Eala in a three-hour third-round match on Saturday night. Two days later she got about an hour of resistance and not much else. Coco Gauff took the opening set 6-1 in the night session on Arthur Ashe, and the 18-year-old across the net never settled into the rhythm of the thing.
The second set did give Jovic something to hold. Gauff broke for 3-2 and handed it straight back in the following game. That was the whole of the trouble. Gauff broke Jovic to love for 5-4 and served out 6-4 without a wobble, and the match finished 6-1, 6-4 in front of a crowd that had come expecting a longer evening.
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Back where she was in 2023
Gauff is 22, and this is her first US Open quarter-final since the year she won the tournament. Three seasons have gone by in New York without her getting this far, which for a home player carrying that much expectation every August has been the awkward line in her record.
Away from Flushing Meadows the picture reads better. She won Roland Garros in 2025 and then lost in the first round at Wimbledon a month later. This year she reached the quarter-finals at the Australian Open and the semi-finals at Wimbledon. Deep runs, no major title since 2025, and a fourth seeding here that now looks about right.
Andreeva waits in the last eight
Mirra Andreeva is the reward. The fifth seed came through Anastasia Potapova 5-7, 6-4, 6-3 in the Louis Armstrong day session, and she walks into the quarter-finals as the reigning French Open champion. It is the toughest name Gauff could have drawn from that section, and neither player has been broken open by anyone yet.
Jovic goes home with the best Grand Slam result of her career and a fourth-round place built on the sort of scrapping that took three hours to get past Eala. Gauff goes into Wednesday with a quarter-final and a favourite’s tag she has not worn at this tournament in three years.
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