John McEnroe confirms that he doesn’t have any insight into what is happening inside Coco Gauff’s team but suspects that the American tennis star will make some changes in the upcoming period following a series of poor results this summer.
Last year, the 20-year-old struggled throughout the first part of the year but everything changed after Wimbledon as she hired coach Brad Gilbert and went on to win her first WTA 1000 title in Cincinnati before also becoming a Grand Slam winner at the US Open.
For this summer, the American had huge plans as she didn’t hide that she was hoping to make some big noise at the Paris Olympics, as well as Wimbledon and The Championships. But in all of those three events, she picked up a round-of-16 loss.
Most recently, Gauff got upset by Emma Navarro in the last-16 at Flushing Meadows and plummeted to No. 6 on this week’s updated WTA rankings list.
“I don’t know about what is going on in her team, but I suspect there will be changes, that’s my guess. When she made the change last year and brought in Brad, it spurred her on and she had this great run in the hard court season. Now it’s a year later and I don’t know what has happened. She is still having issues with her serve, she is still having issues with her forehand,” McEnroe said during a Eurosport event.
“She seems to be more outwardly frustrated on the court and venting more than I’ve seen before. I guess that’s just the pressure of expectations. People are just saying ‘oh, go and follow in the footsteps of Serena Williams’. You are like ‘oh really, that will be easy’. Give me a break.”
McEnroe defends Gauff in this regard
The calendar for this summer definitely wasn’t the most ideal for players since three major events took place on three different surfaces in a span of a month of a half. And while some players elected to skip the Olympics after Wimbledon because they didn’t want to go from grass to clay and then from clay to hard, some like the American tennis star gave a shot to the full schedule.
When taking that into account and considering that Iga Swiatek also didn’t do well at the US Open, McEnroe highlights that it wasn’t easy for Gauff or any other player who played in all those of three tournaments to be well-prepared.
“You can see that all the players who were at the Olympics are struggling physically and mentally. It’s tough to go from clay to grass, back to clay for the Olympics and then straight onto the hard courts. That’s not easy. You look at all the guys that won the medals at the Olympics and they lost early at the US Open, especially in the men’s draw. You look at Jessica Pegula not playing the Olympics and she got on a roll on the hard courts, but players like Iga (Swiatek) struggled after playing in Paris,” the former seven-time Grand Slam champion added.
How Gauff feels and will she make some moves?
After failing to defend her US Open title, the 20-year-old underlined that she wasn’t happy with her result in New York, nor with the ones she had earlier in the weeks prior.
“I guess for me, yeah, it’s not the summer that I want. I feel like there’s, like, 70 other players in the draw that would love to have the summer that I had even though it’s my least probably done well during this time of the year,” the American said.
One of the big reasons why the former world No. 2 lost some matches in the last few months was her serve as she just hasn’t managed to consistently serve well. And in the Navarro match, Gauff sprayed a shocking 19 unforced errors and won just 46 percent of her first serve points and 40 percent of her points on second serve.
When asked if she would be willing to hire a biomechanics coach like Aryna Sabalenka or listen to some opinions, she revealed the doors are open for that.
“I definitely want to get other opinions because, you know, and also I think it’s sometimes more of an emotional, mental thing because if I go out on the practice court right now, I would make 30 serves in a row. I’ve done it before. I think it’s also just kind of a mental hurdle that I have to get over when it comes with that. But I definitely want to look at other things because I don’t want to lose matches like this anymore,” Gauff said.
One fan suggested that Gauff should hire Nick Kyrgios should help her with her serve and the Australian responded to that by confirming he was interested.
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