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Emma Raducanu has highlighted aspects of her game that she needs to brush up on following her latest defeat while she also made her first public comment about her new coach.
The world No 55 was playing in her first encounter since her traumatic experience in the United Arab Emirates when “a man who exhibited fixated behaviour” was ejected from her match against Karolina Muchova at the Dubai Tennis Championships.
It later emerged that the individual “approached her, left her a note, took her photograph, and engaged in behaviour that caused her distress” with Raducanu recently admitting that the past few weeks were “emotional” and she had to think long and hard about competing at the Indian Wells Open.
She made the last-minute decision to travel to California and faced Moyuka Uchijima in the first round of the WTA 1000 event, but she never really got going as she lost 6-3, 6-2 against a player who is three places ahead of her in the WTA Rankings.
Raducanu’s serve was once again malfunctioning as she was broken five times by the Japanese player and key to those woes were the fact that she rarely won the opening point of games and was thus always on the back foot.
When asked where she needs to up her game, Raducanu replied: “I think I’ll need to improve starting the point. I think that’s a big part of tennis. I think I can do that a lot better. I think I could improve I guess being more aggressive and, like, having a better quality of shot going forward into the court more.
The 2021 US Open winner has been without a coach since Nick Cavaday – who had been her full-time mentor since the backend of the 2023 season – stepped down after the Australian Open in January in order to focus on his health.
Platenik has coached the likes of Dominika Cibulkova, Daria Kasatkina, Veronika Kudermetova and Lulu Sun.
But the Slovak hasn’t had much time to get his ideas across to Raducanu as they only started the partnership a day before her Indian Wells opener.
We haven’t necessarily done that much yet, because he arrived very, very recently. So it was the day before the match where we don’t necessarily want to, like, change anything,” she explained.
“So we haven’t actually started, I’d say, like, proper work. From how I have met him, he’s very serious, he’s very professional, gets on with it. We’ll see how it goes.”
The 22-year-old added: “A lot has happened since Australia. It’s good that I have someone who is very experienced here. And we’ll see how the work goes and how we get on as well on and off the court and the methods and everything.
