Coco Gauff’s hopes of home glory end with US Open loss to Caroline Garcia

Coco Gauff’s dreams of a grand slam breakthrough on home soil came to a screeching halt on Tuesday night in the US Open quarter-finals against the in-form Caroline Garcia.

Garcia, the No 17 seed who has been the hottest player on the women’s tour all summer, took the match by the scruff from the start and didn’t let up in a straightforward 6-3, 6-4 win over the 12th-seeded American to reach her first career major semi-final only weeks before her 29th birthday.

“My head is just buzzing,” said Garcia, who extended a career-best streak of 13 straight wins and joined Amelie Mauresmo and Mary Pierce as the only French woman in the professional era to reach the last four at Flushing Meadows. “I don’t know how to describe it.”

Garcia was out to a flying start before the majority of the late-arriving New York crowd had even taken their seats beneath the closed roof of Arthur Ashe Stadium, breaking Gauff in her opening two service games.

Stepping right up to the baseline on Gauff’s first serve and more than a foot inside of it on her second, Garcia put her teenage opponent under immediate pressure with blistering returns deep into the court and sharp, angled groundstrokes off both wings early in the points.

From there Gauff was able to get her teeth into the match by mixing up her serve speed, getting one of the breaks back and playing out the opener on level terms. But it wasn’t enough to make up the difference as Garcia calmly answered the pressure points on her serve with one screaming winner after another to close out the first after 45 minutes.

After breaking Gauff again to open the second set, Garcia began breezing through her service games, compensating for an uneven 52% first-serve percentage with more ferocious