As she lifted the US Open Trophy aloft for the first time at Flushing Meadows in September 2021, Emma Raducanu looked up towards the top tier of the Arthur Ashe Stadium and looked like any young woman taking in the grandeur of the arena in front of her. She was awestruck. Not just by the surroundings, but by the realisation of what she had just achieved.
The 18-year-old had become the first player to come from qualifying to win a Grand Slam, but that incredible achievement over three weeks in North America has been a burden as well as a blessing. With expectation immediately hitting the sky, any setback has left pundits questioning her.
But Raducanu is currently enjoying the best week of her career since that evening in New York, having beaten former world number ones Serena Williams and Victoria Azarenka in consecutive days in Cincinnati. It is even arguable that the gravity of the individual performances trumps anything she managed at Flushing Meadows last year.
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Her run to the title in New York was not the course of landmines that it could have been. She was scheduled to face Ash Barty in the fourth round until the number one seed was beaten by Shelby Rogers in the round of 32, while Karolina Pliskova, Elina Svitolina, Barbora Krejcikova and Aryna Sabalenka – all top 10 players - were each eliminated before they were due to step into Raducanu’s path.
And while Emma did brilliantly to beat the likes of Belinda Bencic, Maria Sakkari and, most memorably of all, Leylah Fernandez – all in straight sets – to win an unlikely title, she never got the opportunity to test herself against some of the greatest names to play in the current era.
So her 6-4, 6-0 victory over 23-time Grand Slam winner Williams was notable not just for the legendary nature of her opponent but also the fact she had taken on and defeated an adversary of real note. To follow that up by beating two-time Australian Open champ Azarenka 6-0, 6-2 makes a similarly huge step, with the Belarusian still among the top 25 players in the world.
Raducanu has still never beaten a top-10 ranked opponent, such have been her tribulations since stunning the world last September, with defeats to Iga Swiatek, Elena Rybakina and Marta Kostyuk representing her only meetings with players seeding 10th or higher in her entire WTA career thus far, and that should be what colours the expectation around her more than what she achieved at the US Open.
She has managed to stay relatively grounded so far, even insisting that if she were to drop the 2040 ranking points she won in New York by being eliminated early from this year’s event it would not be the end of the world.
“If I lose 2000 points, so be it,” she told reporters ahead of her win over Serena. “I’ll start again from the bottom. I know I can do something that no one else has done. I qualified and won the US Open, so I can start from the beginning, I can start from zero and I’m not afraid of that.”
But what she has shown this week is that she can handle herself against the biggest names in the sport, and that is something we had previously been left without evidence of. Maybe this is part of a more natural development for the 19-year-old.
Her exploits last August and September were short and sharp, enough to throw anyone’s life off balance. But more under-the-radar victories against the most experienced players in tennis might do her far more good in the long run than even a Grand Slam win can offer.
*18+ | BeGambleAware | Odds Subject to Change
