An Emma is into the last eight at Wimbledon. An American has broken through and reached her first quarter-final at the All England Club. But it’s just not the Emma or the American you would have expected at the start of Middle Sunday, with Emma Navarro beating Coco Gauff under the Centre Court lights to go deeper into a Grand Slam than ever before. 

When Navarro and Gauff walked onto the lawn, it was widely imagined that the rough evening for Emmas was going to continue as this followed Raducanu’s defeat to qualifier Lulu Sun. But Navarro, who until this summer hadn’t even won a match on the Wimbledon grass, turned in an extraordinary performance that, if she wasn’t so well-adjusted and amenable, might have been the Revenge of the Emmas.

Maybe don’t even think of her as an Emma; to her family, she’s ‘Ice Girl’ for the way she’s able to deal with the pressure with a cool and calm approach, and she demonstrated that with her 6-4, 6-3 victory over the World No.2 and US Open champion.

It was the second occasion inside a week – after a victory over Naomi Osaka in the round of 64 – that she had beaten a Grand Slam champion on Centre Court. 

If anyone ever says that too much money destroys an athlete’s motivation, point them in the direction of Navarro, the daughter of a billionaire financier, who is now just three more match victories away from lifting the Venus Rosewater Dish for the first time.

Under a closed roof, each ‘thwack’ was louder than usual, with the sound somehow bringing a kind of video game quality to this all-American encounter.

While Gauff had only dropped 10 games in her first three appearances, she simply couldn’t handle Navarro’s lawn tennis. “Tell me something,” Gauff seemed to be saying to her box. But what could they possibly tell her when Navarro was hitting the ball like this? “I played really aggressively,” said Navarro. 

For the first time since the mid-1990s, there are no Williams sisters in the ladies’ singles draw. In the absence of Serena and Venus, it had seemed as though this was going to be the summer when Gauff, with all her star power, and actual power, was going to bring some American dazzle to the grass and to truly go deep into the Fortnight for the first time.

And yet, unfortunately for Gauff, she has now lost at this stage of Wimbledon for the third time, having also gone out in the fourth round in 2019 as a 15-year-old qualifier and again in 2021 when she was 17. 

Seven different women have won the ladies’ singles title at the last seven editions of Wimbledon. Is that run going to continue at this wide open Championships?

With Gauff’s defeat, both of the top two women are out, as World No. 1 Iga Swiatek lost on Saturday. The defending champion Marketa Vondrousova has lost, as has two-time finalist Ons Jabeur.

Could Navarro, who next plays Italian Jasmine Paolini, go all the way this Fortnight? Keep on playing like this, and anything’s possible.