Coco Gauff has a chance to play the wise veteran at the French Open

Tennis moves fast.

Veteran tennis star Rafael Nadal made that comment recently when discussing how quickly a new generation of players is taking over the role of the previous one. His words were never truer than on the Suzanne Lenglen court at Roland Garros on Saturday, where Coco Gauff, now in her fifth season on the tour at age 19, was engaged in a duel with an opponent that Gauff and all made others think of themselves. from Wimbledon in 2019.

That rival was Mirra Andreeva, a 16-year-old Russian who has exploded on the women’s tennis tour for the past five weeks.

She knocks out the top 20 players. She plays with an easy, smooth power, unperturbed by the size of the stage and the fuss suddenly made about her. She exchanges text messages with Andy Murray, the three-time Grand Slam champion. She makes sarcastic jokes at press conferences in English.

Similar hype surrounded Gauff four years ago at the All England Club, where he beat Venus Williams on Center Court to roll into the fourth round, riding a hot streak, limited knowledge and the lazy anticipation that the next Serena had arrived. Today, she continues to chase her first Grand Slam and tour title at the highest level.

The glass is half full: Gauff is 19 and already ranked sixth in singles and third in doubles and still hasn’t got her full-grown strength, as her mother puts it. She is also one of the game’s greatest athletes, with an active mind and an awareness beyond the boundaries of the tennis court.

Glass half empty: Gauff has built up some baggage over the past few months in the form of disappointing losses and inconsistent results, and she’s taking it hard. After her fourth-round loss at the Australian Open, Gauff left the press conference in tears. She knows that opponents will pick her forehand. Her serve can disappear at tense moments.

And now she has talented, free swinging younger teens with a nothing-to-lose attitude like Andreeva’s approaching her potential as the next big thing.

It’s both a blessing and a curse of tennis how easily and quickly the declarations of future greatness can come. A few early wins, as Andreeva has achieved in Paris, on the big stage of a Grand Slam tournament are often enough, even if those wins come from an easy draw or catching an opponent on a bad day.

This is especially true in women’s tennis, where fully developed raw power is less of a requirement and more girls than boys can get enough of it to compete at the highest level. But tour veterans say one of their biggest fears is playing against a handsome young player whose tendencies and weaknesses are still unknown.

“They always win some games because no coach has figured it out yet or broken the code,” says 30-year-old Sloane Stephens, who had her own “next-big-thing” moments as a teenager.

The pandemic, Stephens said, exacerbated the problem. There were so few chances to see the teens at the start of the tour because so many junior tournaments were canceled or players couldn’t travel.

There is also a mental aspect to the dynamics. A young player often comes to court believing she has nothing to lose, and some veterans are sure they are about to teach the whipsnapper on the other side of the net a lesson.

Daria Kasatkina said older teens in the juniors are terrified of playing and losing to younger ones and the fear can extend to the tour, when the youngest players compete against adults.

“When you’re 16, you’re not nervous,” Kasatkina said. “I’d say it’s a small advantage. It is a disadvantage and it is an advantage.”

Kasatkina, who hails from Russia, was high on her compatriot, saying she was already physically strong and beat good players on her way to becoming the most talked about newcomer at the French Open.

For 65 minutes on Saturday, the hype was on track to grow. In any case, Andreeva was the match for Gauff, especially in the tight moments.

She broke Gauff’s serve when the 19-year-old served for the set at 6-5, then had Gauff give her three set points in the tiebreak with a shaky forehand and failed drop shot. Andreeva furiously hit a ball into the crowd after losing two (“a really stupid move,” she later said), but on her third chance she hit the back of the line on her serve and put away a big forehand to save Gauff in a one set hole.

But then Gauff stopped giving away points and Andreeva, with about 10,000 fans in attendance, started showing the lesser qualities of her 16-year-old self. She threw her racket on the court when she dropped an early play in the second set. An ugly, soft and fluid second serve early in the third set gave Gauff a 3-1 lead, and things went smoothly from there.

Andreeva later said that after she won the first set, the free and easy mood she had played with since surviving qualifying slipped away. Suddenly she started thinking about how she was one set away from the last 16 of her first Grand Slam.

“A mistake on my part,” she said. “I should have just kept playing.”

Gauff said she told herself that her game plan basically worked, that she wasted a set that she actually won, but that she also learned to read body language and inspire confidence when an opponent got angry. Chalk one for age and experience.

Gauff, by her own admission, is in the purgatory years of her evolution, both on and off the field.

“Transition to adulthood,” is how she described it on the eve of the tournament, trying to figure out which qualities of adolescence she wants to keep and which she wants to throw away.

Gauff is on the stiffer side of the draw, with a possible quarter-final against Iga Swiatek, the world No. 1 whom Gauff beat last year in the final in Paris, if she can beat Anna Karolina Schmiedlova. However, Gauff’s half of the draw got a little easier on Saturday after Elena Rybakina, one of the best players in the world this year, pulled out with a respiratory illness.

Again, Gauff is the younger player in her fourth round match on Monday. Schmiedlova, from Slovakia, is 28 and is ranked 100th in the world.

She said she had long since disregarded those numbers in her approach to competitions, but she was highly qualified to offer advice to at least one demographic in the professional ranks — the upstarts like Andreeva.

“Do it for you,” said Gauff, when asked what she would tell Andreeva about how to handle everything that, right or wrong, will come after her breakout run in Paris. “Don’t do it for someone else. When you get on the pitch, you want to make sure it’s for you, and I think life and the game will be a lot more fun that way.”