Saturday features the championship matches in both women’s singles and men’s doubles.
Aryna Sabalenka suffered a heartbreaking loss to Iga Swiatek in a thrilling final a year ago, which lasted over three hours and was eventually decided by a final-set tiebreak, after Swiatek saved three championship points. A year later, Sabalenka has clearly separated herself from the field as the World No.1. However, a red-hot Coco Gauff, who blitzed Swiatek in Thursday’s semifinals,stands in her way on Saturday night in Madrid.
Earlier in the day, at 3:30pm local time to be exact, the men’s doubles championship will be decided. It will be Marcelo Arevalo and Mate Pavic (1) vs. Marcel Granollers and Horacio Zeballos (5). Arevalo and Pavic have already collected two Masters 1000 titles this season, which they won back-to-back in Indian Wells and Miami. Granollers and Zeballos were champions a few weeks ago in Bucharest, and were also champions four years ago here in Madrid, defeating Pavic and his then-partner Nikola Mektic in the final. Last summer in Canada, Granollers and Zeballos beat Arevalo and Pavic by a score of 10-1 in the deciding-set tiebreak.
Aryna Sabalenka (1) vs. Coco Gauff (4) – Not Before 6:30pm on Manolo Santana Stadium
Sabalenka leads the WTA with 30 wins this season, and just five losses, though three of those losses have come in finals. After being upset in the championship match of the Australian Open by Madison Keys, she’s lost two further finals: to Mirra Andreeva at Indian Wells, and to Jelena Ostapenko less than two weeks ago in Stuttgart. However, despite losing last year’s final, Aryna is a two-time champion in Madrid, and she is 8-4 overall in WTA 1000 finals. She’s dropped just one set through five matches to this stage.
Gauff is a more modest 19-6 on the year, but is coming off an excellent end to her 2024 season, when she went 13-2 and won both Beijing and the WTA Finals. And she seems to have rounded back into form during this fortnight, claiming 10 consecutive sets after losing her first set here 6-0 to Dayana Yastremska. In Thursday’s semifinals, Coco opened a bakery of her own, giving out a pair of breadsticks to Swiatek in a dominant 6-1, 6-1 victory. Iga, the WTA’s Queen of Clay for the last five years, hadn’t been defeated that soundly on this surface since 2019. Gauff is 2-0 in WTA 1000 finals, though this is her first on clay. Overall she is an excellent 9-1 in WTA-level finals, having taken her last seven, dating back nearly three years.
And Coco actually leads her head-to-head against Aryna by a narrow 5-4 margin. That includes their only prior encounter on clay, but that occurred back in 2021. Sabalenka won two of their three 2024 meetings, with Gauff prevailing most recently at the WTA Finals. Their most notable encounter was of course the 2023 US Open final, when Gauff came from a set down to win her maiden Major title.
If Gauff can maintain her level from the semifinals, or anything close to it, this title could be hers. But the winner of this contest between these two big hitters will be the player who commits fewer errors, and strikes fewer double faults. And as of late, Aryna has been the more consistent performer, while Coco’s game can go off the rails at times, especially her forehand and second serve. So I favor Sabalenka to win her third Madrid title on Saturday evening.
Saturday’s full Order of Play is here.
