The brutal truth: Emma Raducanu is being left behind

There is no pleasure to be taken in highlighting this. The reason Raducanu has inspired a strength of emotion out of all proportion to her ranking or results is that she was, all too briefly, British sport’s one unadulterated good-news story, a beam of sunshine and an antidote to an ingrained national inferiority complex. You could cover British tennis for another 100 years and never see a feat to rival her fortnight at Flushing Meadows. That triumph as an 18-year-old qualifier came not because she had a lucky draw – in only her second match on Arthur Ashe Stadium she faced Belinda Bencic, the reigning Olympic champion – but because she was fearless. An abiding memory of that tournament is of how she reacted to every win by laughing, incredulous that her approach of pure, swing-for-the-fences aggression could work so brilliantly.

How she wishes she could channel that person now. As Raducanu considered, after this latest scalding loss, the type of player she wanted to be at 23, you could sense her mentally rewinding to her teenage abandon. “I just want to hit the ball to the corners, and hard,” she said, with a wan smile. “I feel like I’m doing all this variety, and it’s not doing what I want it to do.” Except trying to recapture the cocksure spirit of youth is futile. There has been too much tinkering, too much psychoanalysis, for Raducanu to step on court again and perform as if oblivious to the magnitude of the moment. She has second-guessed herself too many times, and has relied too heavily on dubious outside counsel, to regain this absolute faith in her abilities.

“Buckle up, it’s a long ride.” This was the advice imparted by Shelby Rogers, one of her beaten opponents on that glorious run in New York. Raducanu would have done well to listen. Instead, she has acquired corporate hangers-on at a dizzying rate – “the iron’s hot, we’re striking,” as her agent Max Eisenbud put it – and has gone through coaches with such brutal haste that the Chelsea manager’s job seems a model of security by comparison. The detachment between Raducanu and Francis Roig, her 10th coach, is so obvious that it would be a surprise to see the Spaniard courtside in her corner again. As she looked in vain for answers against Potapova, she refused even to glance his way, before implicitly suggesting that he had meddled to excess with her game.

It has reached the stage where you wonder who would even want the role. Who, realistically, would be prepared to spend 30 weeks a year abroad when there are, as her former coach Dmitry Tursunov famously warned, “red flags”? The Russian was reluctant to clarify what he meant, but the warning signs, from Raducanu’s commercial distractions to the close attentions of her parents on every facet of her play, have been consistent ever since she broke through as a global star. While Mark Petchey was making progress in turning her around last summer, he would find it difficult, in the long term, to trade his broadcast work for a proposition so precarious.

The brutal truth is that Raducanu is being left behind. Take Iga Swiatek, the world No 2, who also won her first slam title as a teenager, and who regularly publicises videos of her ferocious strength and conditioning sessions. Where is this same uncompromising intensity with Raducanu? We are only three weeks into the year, and already she is rifling through a familiar Rolodex of excuses, explaining that she had an inadequate winter training block because of a foot injury and that the wind during the Potapova match was too strong on one side of the court.

Tough draws, tough conditions, tough luck: we have heard it all before from Raducanu, when, in the final analysis, the only toughness she needs to concentrate on is her own. Only then can she escape her characterisation as the wunderkind who found her overnight fame far too much, far too soon. While she likes to project an impression of going through the gears as she evolves, the evidence, after almost five years, is that she is stuck in neutral.

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