At the start of a new season in January 2022, Emma Raducanu began her second full year on the WTA tour swimming in doubt. Not only was she trying to take steps forward after a life-changing summer, her off-season had been ravaged by contracting Covid-19, which forced her off the court for weeks in December. In her first match of the season, she found herself up against Elena Rybakina in Sydney. She left the court with just one game to her name, losing 6-0, 6-1.
That first encounter between Raducanu and Rybakina was a good representation of the difficulties Raducanu has had to navigate over the past few years: the pressure from her sudden rise, her underpowered game against the best players in the world and the fact that there was always another physical issue around the corner.
As she faces the Kazakh again on Friday, the British No 1’s form underscores the consistent progress she has finally made in recent months. Raducanu has lost only six games in her first two matches at the US Open against Ena Shibahara and Janice Tjen and is playing quality tennis, serving confidently and pressuring her opponents by taking the ball early and forcing herself inside the baseline.
However, her two opponents were qualifiers who have never broken the top 100. Rybakina, the 2022 Wimbledon champion, represents an enormous step up in quality and class. The 26-year-old is the best server in the women’s game, leading the tour in service games won, service points won and aces. She backs up that with some of the cleanest groundstrokes in the sport, generating easy pace off both wings. As she showed with her demolition of Aryna Sabalenka two weeks ago in Cincinnati, nobody is safe from being hit off the court when Rybakina is in full flow.
Raducanu’s decision to hire Francisco Roig as her new coach was rooted in trying to improve her game in order to be better equipped to counter the elite players and biggest ball strikers, having lost to Sabalenka in Cincinnati and Wimbledon. Now she will have another chance to measure her progress.
“I do want to see how my game suits and fits against the top,” said Raducanu. “I still think I have a long way to go, but I think I have been making steps towards getting closer and narrowing that gap. I think I have to take confidence from my matches against Aryna in Cincy and Wimby.”
As Raducanu tackles one of the toughest opponents in this year’s women’s draw, Cameron Norrie finds himself up against the greatest player in any men’s draw. Just a few months after their meeting in the fourth round of the French Open, Norrie faces Novak Djokovic for a seventh time.
This has been an eventful summer for Norrie, who returned to his favourite surface during the North American hard-court swing hopeful that his excellent quarter-final run at Wimbledon would propel him to greater heights, but he instead struggled with his physical condition in the heat. While his durability has long been one of his biggest assets, for once it was a problem.
Norrie addressed those issues with a tough pre-US Open training block in the brutal heat at Texas Christian University, his alma mater, and he has performed well in New York. At the end of a tense, attritional four-hour match against Francisco Comesaña on Wednesday, he managed his nerves well and found a way to close out the match to reach the third round.
Norrie has lost all six meetings with Djokovic, winning only two sets, and their previous matches have shown that he does not have the firepower to trouble Djokovic when the Serb is at his best. However, Norrie should head into this match believing that this is his best opportunity to push him to the limit.
“I will say the chances are getting better as the years get on, but I would not say by much,” said Norrie. “But the level he brings, the competitiveness he brings is crazy. Every time I’ve played him, he’s changing his tactics and making it really difficult for me to play. So I’m just ready for anything. Him to play unreal. Him to play not great. Him to be stopping the match for something and then playing really good. I think he’s so, so good at competing and tactics. He’s amazing. So I’m going to have to be ready for anything and I want to just beat him with tennis and physicality.”
Djokovic has not competed since Wimbledon after opting to prioritise his time with his family and his suboptimal preparation has clearly played a part in his two unimpressive wins over Learner Tien and Zachary Svajda.
Djokovic struggled physically in his first-round match against Tien, who repeatedly dragged him into long, attritional exchanges, and emerged from them in far better condition. While Norrie will attempt to exploit the 38-year-old’s waning physicality even more effectively than those before him, it remains to be seen if Djokovic will allow him to get close.
