Coco Gauff makes confession about ‘feeling really bad’ about head-to-head against rival
Coco Gauff used to start matches against Iga Swiatek with a “mental deficit”, but once she got over that barrier, she has managed to reduce the Pole’s massive lead in their head-to-head rivalry.
After beating Gauff in the semi-finals of the 2024 French Open, Swiatek increased her dominant lead in the H2H to 11-1 with the American winning only two sets in those 12 encounters, and that was during her only win in Cincinnati in 2023.
But it then clicked for Gauff at the WTA Finals in Saudi Arabia in 2024 as she claimed her first two-set win over the Pole and she has since notched up another three straight-set wins with the latest coming at the United Cup.
Suddenly that 11-1 lead is down to 11-5 with Gauff now pretty confident whenever she has to face the six-time Grand Slam winner.
When asked after her Australian Open first-round win how she managed to turn things around, the reigning French Open champion said: “There was no other head-to-head I felt really bad about except for that one. In the past I used to think about it so much because you just wanna get the one win and once I got that I kind of erased the other matches…
“Obviously she’s a great player and she deserved those wins. But I felt like some of those losses, I won’t say a lot, because she did outplay me, but some of them at least in the beginning, it was already in the mental deficit.
“I think once I erased that mental deficit I was able to play free. There was like no other head-to-head in tennis where I had that so it was very difficult to navigate.
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“But now I feel like I’m able to play free, but obviously it’s still a big gap in the head-to-head, I just erase it from my mind, can’t change the past, I learn from it.
“I don’t know how it’ll be by the end of our careers, but at least I know the future matches I won’t see starting like that, with a mental deficit.”
Gauff and Swiatek are on opposite sides of the draw with the latter headlining the bottom half while the American finds herself on a semi-final collision course with world No 1 Aryna Sabalenka.
The world No 3 has a much better record against the four-time Grand Slam winner as they are tied at 6-6 with Sabalenka winning their most recent encounter at the 2025 WTA Finals
