Andy Roddick comments on Coco Gauff winning US Open after Serena Williams retirement

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• Serena Williams

Andy Roddick was extremely impressed by Coco Gauff's US Open run, especially knowing it happened in the first year after Serena Williams' retirement. Gauff, 19, became a Grand Slam champion at this past US Open after beating Aryna Sabalenka 2-6 6-3 6-2 in the final.

In four of her seven matches en route to winning the US Open, Gauff required three sets. Although Gauff didn't play perfectly at times, she was still able to find solutions and ultimately win the title. Moments after becoming a Slam champion, Gauff paid special tribute to Serena and Venus Williams, saying they made her believe she could one day be in this position.

With her US Open victory, Gauff became the first American teenager since Serena in 1999 to win the title at Flushing Meadows.

Roddick full of praise for Gauff's US Open run

"I was one of the dummies who questioned whether there would be a vacuum in tennis post Roger and Rafa and Serena, so the timing of Coco Gauff’s win couldn’t have been better, especially here in the US.

Venus and Serena were Coco’s idols, so to announce herself on the Grand Slam stage in the first year of the US Open after Serena’s retirement – a tournament where we saw Serena carry the public interest for a couple of decades – is pretty poetic.

She didn’t play her best every single match, including the final, so the most impressive thing to me was the adjustment in strategy and turning her average days into three-set wins. She tried to go more toe-to-toe with Aryna Sabalenka in the first set and realized that wasn’t going to work, so she needed to make her hit as many shots as possible and rely on her legs.

She went with the mentality of saying, ‘I’m going to be a volume shooter, you’re going to have to beat me four or five times in a rally and I’m going to bring 25,000 of my closest friends into this match, too.’ It seemed to be a little too much for Sabalenka, who deserves credit for being the new No 1 in the world.

It’s not the US Open title that she wanted, but it’s a hell of a consolation prize," Roddick wrote for Betway.