WIMBLEDON — With Emma Raducanu, it often feels as though it’s all about expectations.
Expectations around being a Grand Slam champion at 18, coming through qualifying to lift the US Open in 2021; expectations around the fact that she’s a 21-year-old, ranked outside the world’s top 100, with five match wins majors since the start of 2022. The most recent of which came on Monday at Wimbledon, when she beat the Mexican lucky loser Renata Zarazua in straight sets.
These two things don’t immediately map on to each other — until it’s time to look beyond a narrative that has followed Raducanu since that 2021 triumph, that of a player who has had the most all-or-nothing career imaginable. Since that utterly ludicrous achievement almost three years ago, she has been hugely unlucky with injuries — last year missing eight months of action after needing two operations on her wrists and one on her ankle. Her current ranking of No 135 is deceptively low as a consequence, and at last year’s Wimbledon she wasn’t playing, but rather attended the tournament doing hospitality appearances.
If Raducanu’s career to date has been boom and bust, what she now appears to need is the tranquility of stability — and maybe even more so, the opportunity to be unshackled from expectation in favour of developing at a speed that is more sustainable than what has happened to date. A decent run at Wimbledon 2024 would not be good for that in some ways — given the hysteria it would undoubtedly provoke in her home country — but it would be invaluable to regaining the confidence and fearlessness she showed at Flushing Meadows three years ago. Raducanu has not gone beyond the second round at a Grand Slam tournament since winning the US Open, and if she could make a deep run at this year’s Wimbledon, it would rightly be hailed as a big step forward. What’s different now is that it’s the forward part that matters more than the size of the step.
So far, the tennis gods appear to be smiling down on Raducanu at SW19. She might feel it’s the least they could do after such a horrific run of injuries.
She is already in an open section of the draw, and on Monday her scheduled first-round opponent, the 22nd seed Ekaterina Alexandrova, withdrew due to illness. In stepped Zarazua, a 26-year-old 5ft 3in (157cm) Mexican making her Wimbledon main-draw debut. This was a challenge for Raducanu too, who pre-match had said she was the underdog against the seeded Alexandrova — a status that suited her so well at the US Open. The psychology completely changed once her original opponent pulled out, and Raducanu admitted afterwards that she was nervous in the early exchanges against her new opponent.
The first set was in keeping with the Brit’s up-and-down career, as she led by a break, immediately gave it up and found herself in a tiebreak.
Here, Raducanu upped her level to take it 7-0.
The rest of the match was hit-and-miss from both players, with Raducanu eventually employing a bit more variety to take advantage of her opponent’s wayward forehand and weak serve. Raducanu herself, though, missed a few easy balls and for someone with decent grass-court pedigree — her original breakthrough came at Wimbledon just before that 2021 US Open when she reached the fourth round — she was decidedly shaky at the net. Overall Raducanu won just eight of 24 points (33 per cent) when she ventured forward. She spoke afterwards of emulating the England team’s 2-1 victory over Slovakia on Sunday night by “winning ugly” against Zarazua.
Grinding out wins is a crucial skill for any tennis player, and Raducanu has been doing a good amount of winning recently. She was a semifinalist in Nottingham a few weeks ago, and then backed that up by beating Sloane Stephens and Jessica Pegula (that first top-10 success) to reach the Eastbourne quarterfinals last week.
Skipping the French Open for training before those warm-up grass tournaments has helped refresh her mentally as well. In Eastbourne last Monday, Raducanu spoke of rediscovering her love for the sport. “I’m good. I’m really good,” she said to the first question she was asked. “It’s going very well,” she continued when asked next up about her current level.
“I’m just really into it at the moment. I love the sport. I love tennis. It’s kind of just taken over me. I’ve really rekindled a light and a fire inside of me. Just very happy and enjoying it a lot.”
After missing the French Open and turning down the offer of playing at the Olympics, on top of previous accusations of not being sufficiently focused on her tennis, Raducanu was clearly keen to set the record straight. The next day, after beating Stephens, she wrote “My own pace” on the camera.
“Even though I might get challenged or questioned for not playing certain tournaments like the French Open or the Olympics, I think that for me, that is just part of it,” Raducanu then explained to reporters.
“(It’s about) doing things at my own speed and doing things how I want to, rather than how everyone else thinks is best for me, because ultimately me and the close few people around me only know what is actually best for me and my game.”
One of the biggest challenges for Raducanu has been finding a pace that isn’t too quick for her body. While recovering from those injuries last year, her physio Milly Mirkovic would count every shot Raducanu hit and keep a tally each day to make sure she wasn’t overdoing it. “Staying patient and trying not to rush back is the biggest lesson I took,” Raducanu says of this period.
Finally, she appears to be fit and ready to at least win a couple of matches at a major again. If she can beat the Belgian world No 33 Elise Mertens on Wednesday, she will be in uncharted territory since the US Open win: a Grand Slam third round. Mertens, the doubles world No 1, will be a tough opponent because of how consistent she is, rarely producing the spectacular but seldom making unnecessary errors. Since reaching the semifinals of the Australian Open in 2018, she has been an exemplar in consistency: In 19 of the 24 Slams she’s played since, Mertens has reached at least the third or fourth round, with a couple of quarterfinals and a few early exits the only outliers. She has never won a Grand Slam title like Raducanu, but she has had the kind of career at the top of the game that players dream about.
Stable, neither boom nor bust. And no suffocating expectations.
Raducanu said after her win on Monday that she is determined to be similarly free of too lofty assumptions: “As I said in the first press conference, I’d be over the moon if I won my first round here. And I really am. I feel just the joy to be on-site, the joy to be part of the buzz. I’m really just enjoying myself.
“I think that each match I win should be celebrated a lot. I think for me, ’cause I know how hard matches are to win, to come by. I think that now, yeah, having had a few wins under my belt, I’m like really cherishing every single one because I know how difficult it is to be on the flip side of it.
“Results-wise I have no expectations. I just have expectations of myself to really put myself on the line on the court and fight and not let any frustrations get to me.”
(Top photo: John Walton / PA Images via Getty Images)
