Immediately before Emma Raducanu won the 2021 U.S. Open she was ranked number 150 in the world. Today, she is ranked number 212 in the world. She has to qualify for the French Open because the administrators did not give her a wild card entry. After these years she still has to qualify for a major. No advancement. No progress. No hope as I see it. Disagree? Tell me.
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| Stomach trouble?! Breathing problems? The beginning of a history of illness and injury. Screenhot. |
And therefore I have to conclude that Emma Raducanu has gone backwards since before the 2021 U.S. Open. She has, on the face of it, made no progress whatsoever which is a reality check.
The newspapers continue to write about her but a reality check indicates that she's failed to make progress. Surely we need to look at the hard facts? We have to put aside, now, our expectations for this young woman. It would seem to me that the world has misplaced expectations for her because of her extraordinary success during that U.S. Open tournament three years ago.
Before that tournament we knew nothing about her. There were no real expectations. There were hopes that she might do reasonably well and then she won the tournament; the first qualifier to a tennis tournament to win a major ever in the history of tennis.
And I don't think we can consistently make excuses for this lack of progress. We know that Emma Raducanu has had a series of injuries but it's more than that. It's about her mentality. It's about her attitude and I would argue a lack of commitment to succeeding.
I don't want to sound harsh or be over critical but Emma Raducanu too quickly wants to go back home and doesn't want to stick around long enough and be persistent enough to succeed as a tennis professional.
That is why I said a few months ago that she will retire within 24 months or thereabouts. It's about mentality. I don't actually think she likes tennis any more. She doesn't like all the trappings of the professional tennis life. She prefers to go home and be at home.
This assessment feeds into what she recently said to the news media that she has pushy parents. Have her parents demanded too much of her? Have they pushed her into playing professional tennis as a career when she is not emotionally fit to do it? Just asking.
And I personally believe that some of her illnesses were either semi-psychosomatic or psychosomatic. I think some of them were emotion-based such as the difficulty breathing in her first Wimbledon last-16 match when she had to retire. That I think was a forewarning of what was to come. She was trailing 6-4, 3-0 in this match against Ajla Tomljanovic.
She has retired from matches since when trailing and losing. A lack of steel?
Nobody has discussed this upsetting fact that Emma Raducanu's ranking is now lower than it was just prior to the U.S. Open which he won. This is significant.
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