Third seed Jessica Pegula will face 26th seed Elina Svitolina in the third round of the 2023 US Open. The match will be played on Saturday, August 2, 2023.

Jessica Pegula has breezed into the US Open third round, laying waste to power-hitting Italian Camila Giorgi and unheralded Romanian Patricia Maria Tig, dropping a combined eight games in two matches. Pegula is one of the contenders to win her first major title and she is on the verge of reaching the second week at her home Slam for the second year in a row. But a meeting against resurgent Elina Svitolina is certainly expected to be her first real assignment of these championships. And with the way most of the high seeds have tumbled in the first week, we cannot rule out an upset here.

Elina Svitolina has enjoyed a fine start to life as a mother on Tour. The Ukrainian former World No. 3 returned from maternity leave at the start of April and has won an impressive 17 of 25 WTA matches. In that time, Svitolina reached the quarterfinals of the French Open and the semifinal of Wimbledon – the latter included a thrilling win over World No. 1  Iga Swiatek. Svitolina faced a hard time overcoming Russia’s Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova. After losing the first set 7-5, Svitolina warmed tennis fans’ hearts when she needed ‘a little bit of motivation’ by asking the chair umpire about the whereabouts of her husband Gael Monfils, whose second-round match overlapped that of Svitolina. The 26th eventually turned the match around, winning 5-7, 6-4, 6-4.

Jessica Pegula leads Elina Svitolina 3-1 in their head-to-head, with all four meetings contested on hard courts. Pegula has won the pair’s only meeting of 2023 at this year’s Citi Open in Washington in three sets. This has been a great matchup for the American in the past two seasons, but Svitolina has added more weapons to her game and an aggressive mindset in how to finish off points. That has certainly come in handy in beating some of the world’s best counterpunchers. This should be a close battle, much like what we saw in Washington, but we still think Pegula will frustrate the Ukrainian in a baseline battle and advance to the fourth round yet again.