Coco Gauff Fails to Break the Doha Curse

Doha has not been kind to Coco Gauff in recent years, and 2026 has done nothing to change that narrative. Her first-round opponent, Elisabetta Cocciaretto, is the kind of player whose name doesn’t command attention on a draw sheet but whose game absolutely commands attention on a tennis court.

Gauff Fails to Break Doha Curse

Consider Cocciaretto’s recent results since Wimbledon last year: victories over Iva Jović, Jessica Pegula, and now Gauff herself. Those are names that, on paper, shouldn’t be falling to her.

What makes Cocciaretto dangerous is a combination of relentless fighting spirit and aggressive intent. She doesn’t wait for opponents to make mistakes, and she doesn’t play for rallies. She hunts for the ball and goes after it, and when she senses doubt in an opponent, she pounces. Against a player like Gauff, who has been visibly wrestling with her own confidence, that instinct becomes a weapon. The final score of 6-4, 6-2 reflected the thoroughness of her dominance.

The root cause of Gauff’s defeat was her serve, which has been a recurring problem for some time and remains a significant obstacle. In Doha today, her placement was scattered and unreliable, and Cocciaretto, a savvy competitor, identified the vulnerability almost immediately. She attacked the second serve relentlessly throughout the match, winning 15 of 20 points on it. 

That kind of pressure showed up in the rallies as Gauff finished with 39 unforced errors in 18 games of play. You don’t have to be a mathematician to figure out that it’s a lot.  On her own serve, Cocciaretto did just enough to keep Gauff at bay, denying her the foothold she needed to turn the match around.

The result extended a troubling streak. Gauff hasn’t won in Doha since 2023, making this her third consecutive second-round exit in a city where the courts should theoretically suit her game. Ironically, in her first two tournament appearances, she reached the quarterfinals, which makes the recent slide all the more puzzling.

What’s Going On With Gauff?

This is a difficult question, though not because the problems are hard to identify. The problems are obvious. The harder question is why they persist.

Her serve has been unreliable for a while now. Her baseline game hasn’t looked sharp either. Neither of these observations is new, and that’s precisely what makes them concerning. These aren’t sudden dips in form or the kind of slump that naturally follows a deep tournament run. They are recurring themes that have shown up consistently since the Australian Open, bleeding into events like Indian Wells, where strong results have also been absent.

That said, this stretch of the season isn’t fundamental to how her year will ultimately be judged. There is another significant event coming up in the United Arab Emirates, and there is plenty of time to find form before the season reaches its most important chapters. Missing a deep run in Doha is survivable.

What is harder to dismiss is the stubborn persistence of the same weaknesses. These are areas she should have worked on, areas she and her team are surely aware of, and yet improvement has been slow in coming. Whether the issue is technical, physical, or something more mental is difficult to say from the outside, but the pattern has gone on long enough now that it demands a real answer. Time will tell if Gauff finds one, but the clock is ticking a little louder than it was a year ago.