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Sports · US Open 2026 · Women's Singles · Round of 64
Coco Gauff vs Paula Badosa — 6-4 7-6(5)
 Coco Gauff✓ | 6 | 7 |
 Paula Badosa | 4 | 65 |
Final · Thursday, September 3, 2026 · Round of 64
Result
Badosa was playing a third consecutive day — rain had pushed her first round across two of them — and was the better ball-striker for most of two sets: she hit 25 winners to Gauff's 21 and lost anyway, on 32 unforced errors to 21. Two of those errors were drop shots. The only break of the first set came when she mishit a forehand that should have been a winner and then dumped a drop shot into the net; the break that put Gauff 3-1 up in the second came when another short one clipped the tape and fell back. Gauff then made three errors approaching the net to hand it straight back for 4-4, broke from 0-40 down at 5-5, and was broken back serving for the match. In the tiebreak a Badosa double fault produced two match points and a Badosa backhand landed long on the second. It is Gauff's fifth consecutive third round here and her eighth tiebreak win of the season, against an opponent who had won their last two meetings. "I feel like I had the lead but there wasn't too much I did wrong," she said. "She stepped it up." Next: Cristina Bucsa.
Coco GauffRows the source hadn’t published are left off rather than guessed.
At this Stage
The Round of 64 halves the draw again: 32 women's matches across Wednesday and Thursday, every one of them between players who have already won here this week. The seeds who came through the opening round now meet opponents with form behind them rather than a ranking.
Round of 128
Round of 64
What we know now
Court: Arthur Ashe Stadium
Match length: 2:00
Watch: ESPN · ESPN2 · ABC · ESPN app
What I said beforehand
The preview, frozen before the first serve. Clearly dated, never rewritten — that's the deal that makes the pick worth anything.
Gauff, and the head-to-head is the reason it is not a formality. Badosa has won five of their eight meetings and both of the last two — the Australian Open quarter-final in January 2025 and the Berlin round of 16 in June — which is a longer and better record against Gauff than almost anyone on tour holds. Everything else is on the other side. Badosa is ranked 87th and 14-17 for the season; this was her first tournament since the Hamburg quarter-finals in July, her first hard court since Miami in March, and her first appearance in New York since a back problem kept her out in 2025. She needed two days and at least nine match points to get past Daria Kasatkina, saving all seven break points she faced and squandering the rest of an evening doing it. Gauff is the world No. 4, the champion here in 2023, 42-13 this year and 195-76 on hard courts for her career, and she opened with a straight-sets win over Zeynep Sonmez under a closed roof. A player who has just spent two rain-broken days finishing a first round is not the player who won those eight meetings.
The case for Coco Gauff
78% to winGauff is the world No. 4 and a champion on this court, 42-13 for the season and 195-76 on hard courts, and she has spent one comfortable hour on Ashe to Badosa's two disrupted days. Badosa has played fourteen matches all year and none on a hard court since March; the head-to-head was built by a top-five Badosa who no longer exists at 87th in the world. Gauff's serve is the shot the record says she loses to, and it held through a nine-minute, six-deuce game against Sonmez without conceding the break.
The case for Paula Badosa
22% to winBadosa has beaten Gauff five times in eight tries, on three surfaces, in rounds that mattered — an Australian Open quarter-final and a Berlin round of 16 among the last two. She is 5'11" with the flattest forehand either of them owns, and Gauff's answer to that pattern has historically been to lose the first set. Badosa is also the only one of the two who has already had to solve a problem this week: two rain stoppages, three match points saved against her, a night session lost, and she still closed it out on a service winner. Nothing about her ranking reflects a body that has been available for two months.
Both cases written 2026-09-02, before the first ball — frozen into the record exactly as written, whatever the result. The percentages are mine — opinions with a percent sign on. They add to 100 because tennis has no draw to hide the rounding in.
My locked pick: Coco Gauff to advance ✓ RIGHT
“Badosa owns the head-to-head 5-3 and has won the last two, but she has played fourteen matches all year, none on a hard court since March, and spent two rain-broken days on a first round Gauff cleared in an hour.”
Locked 2026-09-02 17:50 UTC — rendered verbatim from the pick ledger; never a fresher, hedged version
Tale of the tape
Coco GauffPaula BadosaPlayer vitals: US Open official player feed (usopen.org) and Tennis Abstract career match logs · as of 2026-09-02.
Career head-to-head: Tennis Abstract career match logs (tour-level) · as of 2026-09-02.
Storylines
- Badosa leads the head-to-head 5-3 and has won the last two — 7-5 6-4 in the 2025 Australian Open quarter-finals and 1-6 6-3 6-2 in the Berlin round of 16 in June.
- Badosa's first round took two days: rain stopped her at 6-1, 5-4, 40-40 on Tuesday night with three match points already saved, and she finished it against Kasatkina on Wednesday afternoon.
- This is Badosa's first tournament since the Hamburg quarter-finals in July and her first US Open appearance since 2024; a back problem kept her out in 2025.
- Gauff won this title in 2023 and is one of two players in the draw with more than one major; she beat Zeynep Sonmez 6-3 6-4 on a closed-roof Ashe in the first round.
- Badosa is ranked 87th and 14-17 for the season; Gauff is No. 4 and 42-13.
Head to head
Badosa leads 5-3 and has won the last two: 7-5 6-4 in the Australian Open quarter-finals in January 2025, and 1-6 6-3 6-2 in the Berlin round of 16 on grass in June. Gauff's three came at Doha in 2022, in the Rome round of 16 in 2024 and in the Beijing semi-finals later that year.
Source: Tennis Abstract career match logs (tour-level) · as of 2026-09-02.
Court & schedule: Arthur Ashe Stadium, Thursday 3 September in the night session. The US Open posts each day's order of play the evening before; this one is on the board. (Official US Open order of play, as of 2026-09-02)
Weather: Sunday — the men's final, and the last match of the fortnight — is 78°F with showers and thunderstorms 95% likely, the wettest day of the two weeks and the one day that cannot be pushed back. Ashe closes its roof and plays on. It clears overnight: 20% Sunday night, 20% Monday, then dry and sunny from Tuesday. (National Weather Service New York forecast, as of 2026-09-13)
Venue: USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, Flushing Meadows, New York — hard.