Iga sanctions a debutante and Coco gets tough on a young pretender. It's dog eat dog on the surface of Argentine dreams.
Hour bout, that one
Iga Swiatek was fair battering Xinyu Wang in their third round match on centre court. The top seed was 5-0 up in 22 minutes. Not surprising really as 21-year-old Wang was playing in the third round at a Grand Slam tournament for the first time. Less than half an hour later, it was all over - 6-0, 6-0 to the 22-year-old Pole. "I always try to kind of be careful because you don't want to get lazy after winning these kind of matches," said Swiatek. "It's never easy to win these matches. But on the other hand, sometimes all your head can remember is the score." Wang will.
Nice of the organisers
The tournament organisers displayed feet as fleet as Iga's after her 51-minute annihilation of Xinyu Wang. It was barely 4.30pm and no more matches were scheduled for the centre court before the night fest at 8pm between Alex Zverev and Frances Tiafoe. The people were offered up a last-16 in the men's doubles between the Belgian duo Sander Gille and Joran Vliegen and Edouard Roger-Vasselin and Santiago Gonzalez. As Roger-Vasselin is French ... they cheered for the Franco-Mexican duo m especially when the local hero received treatment on his right leg. He was hobbling by the end of the game and his service game at 5-5 in the decider was a study in cussedness. It went to the tiebreaker. The Belgians were as clinical as Iga and progressed to the quarters. Still, Eddy and Gonzi got a rousing send-off. Nice.
Queen to rookie
And so the old lady Coco Gauff beat off the young pretender Mirra Andreeva to reach the fourth round. Andreeva won the first set tiebreaker but Gauff - last year's beaten finalist - turned on the style. She raced through the next two sets 6-1, 6-1. "I don't think she was thinking: 'Oh, I'm only 16 and she's 19, she's older,'" said Gauff. "If she was thinking that she wouldn't win a match because she beat people older than me. And at my age I wasn't thinking about that, I was just thinking about playing the ball." The winning move, clearly.
Rookie learning curve
Mirra Andreeva had the first set against Coco Gauff and the 16-year-old Russian admitted she went off thinking about the last-16. "I realized that I could really win this match," she confessed. "Then I got a little bit nervous not to lose this opportunity." Gauff walloped her 6-1 in the second. And whacked her by the same score in the decider. Well, at least Andreeva took the point. "I think that was a mistake from me. I should have just continued playing and that's it."
Don't mention the score
Francisco Cerundolo played a blinder - as they say in the game with the bigger ball and 11 men - against the ninth seed Taylor Fritz. The 24-year-old Argentine dropped the first set but recovered with some panache to win the next three and reach the last-16 at one of the four Grand Slam tournaments for the first time. "To be in the second week is fantastic," he told the on-court interviewer Fabrice Santoro. "In Argentina we grow up playing on clay and dreaming of playing here at Roland Garros and winning some matches." The fans liked that line and cheered raucously." Good thing he didn't mention France's World Cup final loss to Argentina last December.
