NEW YORK — The second set was slipping away from Coco Gauff in the U.S. Open’s fourth round on Sunday, so maybe she was frustrated by that, or the stumble that left her doing the splits while getting broken, or the pair of double-faults that helped Caroline Wozniacki take that game.

Or perhaps it was simply that the last thing she wanted to hear at that moment was the near-constant chatter coming from Brad Gilbert, one of her two coaches sitting in the front row at Arthur Ashe Stadium.

Either way, Gauff turned toward Gilbert and said, “Please stop.” Then, during the next game, which allowed Wozniacki to force a third set, Gauff told him, “Stop talking.”

That was while Wozniacki was grabbing four consecutive games to go up a break in the third set. And then, just as the match seemed to be slipping away thanks in part to a slew of unforced errors, Gauff straightened out her strokes and pulled away. She collected the last six games for a 6-3, 3-6, 6-1 victory over Wozniacki, the 33-year-old mother of two who recently came out of retirement.

“I was getting frustrated. It wasn’t really directed at him. It was just that I needed to reset,” the sixth-seeded Gauff said. “In that moment, I just didn’t want to hear anything. I just wanted to think about what I was doing.”

Her next opponent will be defending champion Iga Swiatek or No. 20 seed Jelena Ostapenko. The top-seeded Swiatek was scheduled to face Ostapenko on Sunday night.

Gauff, whose best showing at a major was reaching the final at the 2022 French Open before losing to Swiatek, has now won 15 of her last 16 matches.

That run follows a first-round exit at Wimbledon in July and includes the two biggest titles of her career, at the DC Open and in Cincinnati. It also coincides with the additions of Pere Riba as her full-time coach and Gilbert in a role that’s been described as a temporary consultant.

Against Wozniacki, the 2018 Australian Open champion and twice the runner-up in New York, Gauff was trying to find the right balance between being the aggressor (what she wanted) and not going for too much (what Gilbert wanted).

Gilbert’s “scouting reports are quite accurate,” Gauff said. “Sometimes you have to change things up. Today I had to change things up.”

It was the hottest day of the event so far, with the temperature reaching 90 degrees, and Gauff kept missing the mark in the second set, to the tune of 22 unforced errors. But she cleaned that up considerably down the stretch, with just eight miscues in the last set. Also key in the third: Gauff compiled an 11-2 edge in winners.

“She’s always been a great athlete. She’s always had the backhand, the serve, the fighting spirit,” Wozniacki said. “I feel like right now, it’s all kind of coming together for her.”

At least one American man will reach the semifinals for the second year in a row. That’s because No. 10 Frances Tiafoe, who got to that stage 12 months ago, and unseeded Ben Shelton set up a quarterfinal meeting with wins Sunday.

Taylor Fritz made it three men from the United States in the quarterfinals – the most since Andre Agassi, James Blake and Robby Ginepri got there in 2005 – by overwhelming Swiss qualifier Dominic Stricker, 7-6 (2), 6-4, 6-4. Fritz’s reward is a quarterfinal against 23-time Grand Slam champion Novak Djokovic.

Tiafoe eliminated Australian wild-card entry Rinky Hijikata 6-4, 6-1, 6-4.

In the day’s first match in Ashe, the 20-year-old Shelton hit a pair of aces at 149 mph – the fastest by anyone all tournament – in a single game and eliminated another American, No. 14 Tommy Paul, 6-4, 6-3, 4-6, 6-4.

“I think it was straight adrenaline,” he told the crowd after the match. “Any other atmosphere, I couldn’t get it done.”

Shelton, who won the NCAA singles title at Florida in 2022, is the youngest American man to reach the final eight at Flushing Meadows since Andy Roddick did it at the same age in 2002.

In the women’s draw, No. 10 seed Karolina Muchova of the Czech Republic reached the quarterfinals with a 6-3, 5-7, 6-1 victory over Wang Xinyu.

She did it after losing control of the second set to her Chinese opponent. She regained control in the third set with a strong all-court attack that included 32 winners.

“I came back to my game, to slice it more and to change the rhythm – that was the key,” Muchova told the Louis Armstrong Stadium crowd in her post-match interview.

Muchova’s next opponent is No. 30 Sorana Cirstea, a 6-3, 6-3 winner over 15th-seeded Belinda Bencic. It marks the Romanian’s second run to a Grand Slam quarterfinals after doing it at the French Open in 2009.

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