Having spent just seven hours on court in the past month, Emma Raducanu had always been realistic about her Wimbledon ambitions.
An off-shoot of her side strain was a lack of practice and competition in the pre-tournament build-up, and she struggled for consistency in a 6-3, 6-3 defeat by Caroline Garcia on Centre Court yesterday.
And yet the optimism does not appear to have diminished after what was the ninth time in 11 tournaments this year that she has not made it past the second round.
Instead, she focused on the positives she would take from two visits to Centre Court in the space of two days.
“I’ll just get better,” said Raducanu in the aftermath of the Garcia loss. “I’ll just look at what’s not working, what my weaknesses are, improve them. It’s good for me.
“These lessons are coming every single week. It’s just a reminder you’ve got to do this, this and that. It comes from different players, so it just highlights it.”
Of those early losses, she said: “It will make me a better player, because they’re just highlighting all my weaknesses. It’s great for me to get all these lessons at such a young age, so that when I’m in my mid-20s, I’ll have those issues or glitches in my game sorted.”
At 19 and in her first season on the WTA Tour, Raducanu is still very much a work in progress. She has already chopped and changed coaches in the year since her breakthrough to the last 16 at Wimbledon 2021.
And she and her father, Ian, have made no secret of the fact they do not necessarily intend to pursue the more traditional route of one established coach for a period of time.
Instead, she has been like a sponge working under different coaches, from Andrew Richardson at the US Open to the most recent incumbent, Torben Beltz, before their split in April.
The spotlight has been enormous on Raducanu and yet she seems refreshingly unfazed by it. When it was suggested that the pressure would be enormous heading to the US hardcourt leg of the season as US Open champion, she rejected the notion.
“There’s no pressure,” she said. “Why is there any pressure? I’m still 19. Like, it’s a joke. I literally won a Slam. Going back to New York, it’s going to be cool, because I have got a lot of experiences playing on big courts, playing with people in the stadium, playing with the spotlight on you.
“I don’t mind that. I’m embracing every single moment that is thrown at me. But I’m a Slam champion, so no one’s going to take that away from me. If anything, the pressure is on those who haven’t done that.”
