Coco Gauff’s forehand unravels again in Qatar Open defeat to Elisabetta Cocciaretto

Coco Gauff has never enjoyed the Qatar Open. She had played eight matches in Doha, winning four, before entering the 2026 edition.

Tuesday’s 6-4, 6-2 loss to Elisabetta Cocciaretto in her opening match will still have stung more than most, not for the result, but for the recurrence of problems with Gauff’s forehand that look set to define her coming season if she can not take the time away from tournament play to fix them.

Cocciaretto, the world No. 57 who can rush the best off the court when she is playing well, stayed steady under pressure and managed not to overpress when Gauff was on top in rallies. But the story of the match was the American world No. 5’s forehand, which sprayed errors of all kinds throughout. Some blasted almost to the back wall. Some flew out wide. Others were shanked vertically. Worse for Gauff, the slow hard courts defanged her defense mechanism: the slow, heavy forehand that she plays into her opponent’s backhand in a bid to pen them back.

She used it to beat Karolína Muchová at the Australian Open. But in slower conditions in Doha, anything without enough depth just begged for Cocciaretto to hit a backhand on the hop and crush it crosscourt into the corner.

Only down 5-2 in the second set and facing imminent defeat did Gauff start truly flowing through the court, pushing Cocciaretto back and attacking short balls that sat up short in the court. But the Italian, who had never won a set against Gauff in three meetings, saved a break point with an inside-out backhand winner, a shot that Gauff can use when her forehand is not firing, but could not bring into play enough Tuesday.

The loss will have little effect on Gauff’s ranking and indeed on her season. But it shows that as her serve improves, not yet as fast as she wants it to be but more stable, the much more challenging assignment of remodeling her forehand looms larger. Changing a serve is difficult, but it is also a closed skill which the player almost entirely controls.

A forehand is an open skill, subject to whatever variety of speeds, spins, court positions and contexts Gauff has to manage during any given match. Training that requires longer than any player’s off-season can provide, but missing tournaments would mean losing ranking points and prize money and falling down the rankings, making the matches that Gauff will have to play to regain her position get harder earlier in tournaments.

Some matches will look like this one. Others will look like her Australian Open quarterfinal defeat to Elina Svitolina, in which the Ukrainian blitzed Gauff off the court. And a great many more will look like the matches she wins, when she manages to pin opponents back with her forehand down the line, unloads when she hits it crosscourt, and then uses her phenomenal backhand and peerless speed and athleticism to win points she should lose three times over.

This was on display even against Cocciaretto, who brought up 11 break points but only converted three. But Gauff’s 39 unforced errors against 13 winners were just too much to overcome, with the WTA Tour not splitting error data by groundstroke.

A two-time Grand Slam champion and top-five mainstay at just 21, Gauff has plenty of time in her career and plenty of credit in the bank. That does not make the decision she may soon have to make about her tournament fortunes and her tennis future any less complicated.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Tennis, Women's Tennis

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