The United States has qualified for the United Cup quarter-finals in Perth after a complicated group-stage victory over Spain Monday.
World No. 9 Taylor Fritz had to save a match point against Jaume Munar to keep alive the defending champion's hopes of topping Group A after Coco Gauff suffered a shock three-set loss to World No. 42 Jessica Bouzas Maneiro in the day's opening match.
The United States' conquest of Group A was only complete when Gauff found redemption on the mixed doubles court, partnering Christian Harrison to a 7-6(5), 6-0 win over Inigo Cervantes and Yvonne Cavalle-Reimers after they rallied from an early break in the first set. Spain has now been eliminated from the tournament.
In the second match of the day, World No. 9 Fritz saved a match point in a do-or-die clash with Munar, who would have sent Argentina to the quarter-finals had he upset the American.
Seeing his first break points of the match at 5-6 in the third, Fritz failed to convert both match point opportunities and later saved a match point on his serve in the tie-break before winning 7-6(4), 3-6, 7-6(6) in three hours and 14 minutes.
"It was a crazy match," Fritz said. "I thought Jaume played very well. I felt I was in a lot of his service games but he played so well on so many of the big points.
"I had to come up with a lot to keep myself in the match or convert any of the big points. It was really tough, really physical."
Fritz took a seven-minute medical time-out at 4-all in the third set to treat a bloodied toe after a long slide chasing a drop shot. He saved a break point in the following game.
The United States won Group A with a 2-0 record after its initial win over Argentina. Had they lost the mixed, the Americans would have finished runner-up in Group A and would only have claimed a quarter-final berth if they had a better record than the other two Group runners-up.
Fritz came into the tournament after intensive rehab in the offseason on his knee for what he described as “pretty serious tendonitis”. But he didn’t give an inch to Munar in a series of lengthy baseline exchanges. He also fired 16 aces to add to the 22 against Baez.
"The knee is something I'm going to be dealing with for a while," he said. "... I started feeling it towards the end of the first set but it didn't get any worse. Typically I start feeling it and it gets worse and worse and worse until I can't even bend it. So I'm really happy with the fact that it stayed at the level it was at and it wasn't bad enough to stop me from playing through."
Jessica Bouzas Maneiro is coming off a breakout 2025 season in which she set a career-high ranking of No. 40, reached the fourth round of a Grand Slam for the first time at Wimbledon and made her first WTA 1000 quarterfinal in Montreal.
On Monday at the United Cup, the Spaniard carried that momentum into 2026, upsetting World No. 4 Coco Gauff in dominant fashion, 6-1, 6-7 (3), 6-0 at RAC Arena. The loss is Gauff’s first at the United Cup in 10 matches across singles and doubles; she entered the day 6-0 in singles and 9-0 overall.
The win marks Bouzas Maneiro’s first career Top-5 victory.
“I know Coco and she’s a fighter,” Bouzas Maneiro said after the match. “She’s there all the time in the match, so I knew that I had to be there, and even if I’m 4-1 up, I have to be there. And yeah, she won the second set and I went to the bathroom and I was trying to focus just to take it point by point.
“And that was my mentality in the third set. To be [there] with power every point because even if you are [up] 3-0 or 4-0, you have to be ready.”
Bouzas Maneiro set the tone immediately, breaking Gauff in the opening game en route to a 5-0 lead. She went on to break the American in all four of her service games in the first set and nine times overall.
Her forehand -- which produced 11 winners in the match -- fueled her early surge, but her return game, paired with Gauff’s serving struggles, defined the rest of the match. It was a stark contrast to Gauff’s dominant performance earlier in the week against Argentina’s Solana Sierra.
Gauff landed just 60% of her first serves and won just under 60% of those points. She was further undone by 14 double faults and 54 unforced errors. Bouzas Maneiro could only match Gauff’s first-serve numbers but managed her unforced errors more effectively (41) and converted 9 of 12 break points.
Still, Gauff refused to go quietly despite her struggles. She rallied from 4-1 down to take the second set in a tiebreak and appeared poised for a remarkable comeback. But Bouzas Maneiro broke to open the decider and never looked back, racing to a 4-0 lead after saving two break points in a five-deuce game.
After 2 hours and 12 minutes, Bouzas Maneiro closed out the match with a third-set bagel, earning a bit of redemption after being blanked in a deciding set by Sierra earlier in the week, and secured the biggest win of her career.
