Coco Gauff and Naomi Osaka meet at tennis coaching crossroads in Beijing

The coaches’ theory of the ‘other man’ is a sporting reality.

A team that loses more than it wins will often replace them with a disciplinarian, with a so-called ‘players coach’ who specializes in building relationships with athletes and creating a relaxed atmosphere. The reserved coaches who are not successful are being replaced by highly motivated, high-energy, emotional types. Bookish types who focus on X’s and O’s return when this movement fades.

Tennis players are no different; latest cases Coco Gauff And Naomi OsakaWHO She duels in the year’s penultimate WTA 1000 tournament in Beijing on Tuesday.

Both players entered the year with high hopes, but could not meet these hopes. Following early eliminations at the US Open (Gauff lost in the fourth round and Osaka in the second) they both announced coaching changes.

Gauff kicks Brad Gilbertone of the sport’s greatest personalities. He is an ESPN commentator and former coach. Andy Roddick And André AgassiWith the grand unified theory of tennis, also known as Winning Ugly. Gauff then recruited Matt Daly, a little-known clutch specialist, to work alongside low-profile French trainer Jean-Christophe Faurel, who had worked with Gauff on and off since she was 14 years old.

Faurel most recently rejoined Gauff’s entourage this past spring to work with Gilbert. Gilbert and Gauff barely knew each other when he hired him in the summer of 2023. US Open champion.

Meanwhile, Osaka breaks up with Wim FissetteThe quiet, intelligent Belgian who helped him win two Grand Slam titles in 2020 and 2021. It would be okay if Fissette never appeared on television. Osaka’s new coach Patrick Mouratoglouformer coach Serena Williams. He has a talent for motivation and self-promotion, with a brand empire that includes an academy in the south of France as well as unlimited Ultimate Tennis Showdown (UTS) tennis exhibition events and coaching camps in luxury resorts.

He was almost too well known for Osaka. Mouratoglou’s history with Williams and his presence in the game made him want to stay away.

“His personality is so big,” Osaka said at a press conference in Beijing. So great was she that he was skeptical of her coaching abilities: Anyone who coached the greatest female player of the modern era could take credit for Williams’ success.

““Then I met him, talked to him, worked with him in the field,” he said.

“He’s definitely a very good coach.”

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John Kerry, the long-serving senator, US secretary of state and American climate czar, once boiled down his philosophy of governance, war and diplomacy essentially to ‘fixing things as quickly as possible when you’re wrong’.

Sports aphorists often talk about the first law of holes: When you get into the hole, stop digging.

Both basically sum up Osaka and Gauff’s coaching pivots. Players often make these moves after the season ends, rather than two months before the end of the season. Gauff and Osaka are on the Asian side, which is especially important for Osaka, who carried Japan’s torch at the Tokyo Olympics three years ago. Next comes the WTA Finals in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where Gauff can attend, and the Billie Jean King Cup in Malaga, Spain, where Osaka plans to play.

But by mid-September, they already had all the data they needed to conclude that they were either heading in the wrong direction (Gauff) or stalling (Osaka).

While Gauff’s results were off the mark – she had lost to Emma Navarro in the fourth round at Wimbledon before Donna Vekic defeated her in the third round of the Paris Olympics – the bigger problem was technique. One of Gilbert’s greatest strengths as a coach, his ability to cover his weaknesses, had diminished.

Quality opponents had figured out how to counter his looping forehand to cover up his swing on that side. They would step in and collect the rising ball before it bounced high enough to trap them at the back of the pitch.

Against Navarro at Wimbledon, he begged Gilbert to tell him something, and at that moment he realized he didn’t have the tools he needed to escape Navarro.

Then there is his service. in that Lost to Navarro in the fourth round at the US Open It contained 19 double errors.

“I don’t want to lose matches like this anymore,” he told reporters afterwards.

Gilbert, who has forgotten more about tennis than most people do, never sells herself as a serve specialist or the kind of coach someone as mired in technical limitations as Gauff might need right now. Even during Gilbert’s tenure, Gauff had worked with Roddick on some minor service adjustments.

In an interview last week, Gilbert declined to go into detail about his work with Gauff but said it was an overall positive experience.

He believes the ultimate parameters of tennis have not changed. Players must first find their strengths, then find out what their opponents do well. They then plan to override their opponents’ strengths while imposing their own strengths on the match. However At 63, after more than four decades in professional football, Gilbert knows the drill. When a player wins one of the Grand Slams, expectations increase, although the competition is still fierce. Everyone wants to win, and there are only four majors every year.

Gilbert said the women’s game is a little more unpredictable but still “there aren’t a lot of opportunities.”

“Every coaching experience is a unique experience and you move on,” he added. “This is a beautiful thing.”

Gauff, who is only 20 years old, is impatient for success but thinks long term. He is approaching the autumn tournaments in Asia as an extended pre-season, prioritizing improvement over winning and finishing the season in the top eight, which would qualify him for the season-ending tour Finals.

His team prefers their coaches to talk little about him; He notices that the subtle changes Daly has made are already paying off.

Daly, 45, played at Notre Dame and was briefly coached by Denis Shapovalov. He is the founder of a company that sells a tool called GripMD, which wraps around the handle of a racquet to help players use the traditional continental grip.

Gauff hits her forehand with a firm western grip, essentially holding the racquet below the handle. Don’t expect him to switch to a continental grip on his forehand any time soon – it’s not enough. Its primary focus is service, but It may take some time for dividends to appear in the statistics tables. She committed six double faults and 27 simple errors in two sets on Tuesday, and she and Osaka shared them before Osaka retired with a back injury.

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If Gauff has a long-term view, Osaka wants results now, too. It wasn’t always this way.

He faced tough draws all season long, especially Iga Swiatek is on the verge of elimination from the French Open. He was introspective at the time and coined a little aphorism of his own: Results didn’t add up, he told reporters. Fissette and Osaka were focusing on her comeback through the long lens for this season and the next five years. The mantra was to wait for the summer and fall when tennis would move to the hard courts on which Osaka had built its reputation.

This wait gradually weakened Osaka’s confidence. Afterwards Carolina Muchova After he defeated him in New York, he told reporters that a part of him died when he lost. Osaka was not the cynical, generous Osaka of Paris. The French Open was a lifetime ago in his world and he believed he would achieve more success on his favorite ground. Muchova swimming Semi-finals at the US Open and was probably one volley away from the final and probably doing what Osaka wanted to do.

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Osaka and the rest of the locker room know she needs to come back better, improve her second serve and regain the confidence that, at her best, has made her such a banker in crucial moments. More than anything, that was his superpower, and it was mostly missing this year.

For this reason, he was transferred to Mouratoglou two months before the end of the 2024 season. He is number 73 in the world and is keen to break into the top 32 to be seeded at the Australian Open in January.

His former coach, Fissette, is known as a master strategist and tennis technician. Self-confidence comes from results in his world. He shares with Mouratoglou a belief in playing aggressively and turning up the intensity when it delivers results, but he is no one’s definition of a hype man. Mouratoglou can prompt the postman to deliver the mail.

Osaka had considered hiring Mouratoglou before reconnecting with Fissette while planning her return from maternity leave. He went with the Belgian because of his track record. When you don’t come back she and Mouratoglou trained together in California after the US Open, then decided to join the women’s tour together.

“I don’t want to regret it,” Osaka added in Beijing last week.

“At this stage of my career I really need to learn as much as possible. “Patrick seemed like the guy with the knowledge.”

They got off to a good start with three consecutive wins, including Osaka’s first comeback win against Yulia Putintseva in two years. But eEven the best coach can’t be very successful with an injured player.

After shaking hands with Gauff in one set, Osaka said her back had stiffened to the point of locking in practice, before the American carried her bag off the court. He was able to start but his condition worsened as the match progressed.

“Totally worth it though hahaha,” he wrote on Threads.

Sounds like something Mouratoglou would say.

(Top photo: Yanshan Zhang / Getty Images)