Defending finalist Coco Gauff made a winning return to the Internazionali BNL d’Italia on Thursday with a 6-3, 6-4 win over Czech teenager Tereza Valentova.<\/p>\n
The third seeded needed 1 hour and 34 minutes to pick up her 18th career match win at the Foro Italico — which is a career-best win total for the American at tournaments outside of the four Grand Slams on the WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz. She broke Valentova’s serve six times in the win, improving to 2-0 against her after beating her at Roland Garros last spring.<\/p>\n
Gauff said afterwards that the “super talented” Valentova “definitely stepped up her level” in the rematch, particularly on return. Gauff served seven double faults in the match — but balanced things out by winning more 60% of the points played in the Czech’s service games.<\/p>\n
” I felt like I was having to try so hard to hit big serves,” Gauff said, adding: “I missed some because she was pressuring my serve.”<\/p>\n
“A lot of things I thought she would do she didn’t do, which I guess makes sense because last year didn’t go so well [for her],” Gauff continued. “There were some changes, but I think that just goes with improvement.”<\/p>\n
Other key stats from Gauff’s win included:<\/p>\n
2: Gauff’s win against the 19-year-old Valentova snapped a short skid against players younger than her. Gauff is now 15-4 in her career against younger players — but just 3-3 since beating Valentova on her way to the title in Paris last year. She had lost her last two matches to such players — first to Alexandra Eala in Indian Wells (by retirement) and last week to Linda Noskova in Madrid.<\/p>\n
4: The American stormed out of the gates in the opening set, winning the first four games. In set two, Gauff lost a pair of marathon service games that pulled Valentova level at 3-3 and 4-4 — but won the last two games to carry herself over the line.\u00a0<\/p>\n
6: In addition to breaking Valentova’s serve six times, Gauff also saved six of the 10 break points she faced in the match.<\/p>\n
7: Since that loss via retirement to Eala in March, Gauff is 7-0 against players ranked outside the Top 50 in the PIF WTA Rankings.<\/p>\n
17: In a statistical oddity, Valentova hit two more winners than Gauff (17 to 15), and also two fewer unforced errors (27 to 29). But Gauff won nearly 20 more total points — 75 to 58.\u00a0<\/p>\n
20: Gauff has now recorded 20 wins this season in 28 matches played.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Gauff will next face unseeded Argentine Solana Sierra in the third round. Sierra defeated former Rome finalist Anhelina Kalinina 6-2, 6-3 to continue on in her main-draw debut in Rome, following a fourth-round effort in Madrid last week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Defending finalist Coco Gauff made a winning return to the Internazionali BNL d’Italia on Thursday with a 6-3,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":571711,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,1602,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-571710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-text","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=571710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571710\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/571711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=571710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=571710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=571710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}