Emma Raducanu ‘too good not to succeed,’ says fellow Brit
Mark Petchy says Emma Raducanu is ‘too good not to succeed,’ but he has implored the former US Open champion to start stringing some tournaments together.
Raducanu became the first ever qualifier to win a major in 2021 when she won the US Open. It was a win that immediately propelled her to superstardom.
However, her career has stagnated since then, with injuries preventing her from playing much tennis and off-the-court interests dividing her focus.
She heads into 2025 ranked 59 in the world, which is her best for a while. She also appears to be largely injury free after double wrist surgery a year ago.
For Petchy, though, that just means that now is the time for the 22-year-old to make tennis her full-time focus and start putting matches under her belt again.
“The harder you work, the easier it becomes when you play tennis matches,” Petchy told Betway. “When you know you’ve put in the work the matches become ‘easier’ because your practice sessions should be arguably harder than the matches themselves.
“Emma [Raducanu] is too good in my opinion not to succeed. She’s too athletic. She’s too motivated when she’s in between the lines. I think sometimes there have been a few times when she hasn’t been as prepared as she would like to be.
“I have 100 per cent confidence she will do the work in the off-season. There’s nobody out there that’s going to enjoy playing Emma when she’s fully fit and fully motivated. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to sit here and say to you that she’s going to be pushing a lot of the top 10 players consistently over the next twelve months.
“But there has to be a commitment to week in week out tournaments. The dipping in and out doesn’t help the physical side of things. I want her to have longevity in the sport. I don’t want her out of the sport at 26 or 27.
“Her team should be looking at how they manage her from here on in for another fifteen years of playing this sport if that’s what she wants to do. I think she’s well placed to do that.”
“It’s very easy in life to judge and to point out the mistakes that people make. You can only live your life forward.
“From my perspective what Emma has had to face in the last two and a half years are good harsh lessons. Those lessons have made her realise that if she wants to be one of the best players in the world there’s a way that you have to do it. There’s not really a cheat sheet.
“There’s a volume of work and a necessary number of tournaments that you have to play. My sense is that she’s super aware of that now.
“From that perspective, I think she is in the right sort of spot that she needs to be in, in terms of being able to become a player that’s residing comfortably inside the world’s top twenty.
“I said back in 2021 that the next couple of years were going to be pretty bumpy for her and hopefully she was going to get the right guidance.
“It’s probably been a year longer than I thought it was going to be but if you were to ask me now how I see 2025 going, I feel she’ll be inside the world’s top 25 at the end of the season. Physically, hopefully, those sorts of issues are behind her.
“But if Raducanu plays a relatively full season, I think she’ll be inside the top twenty-five looking at where her game is at and the things that she’s trying to prove. I do think she needs to put her game on the court consistently now for six months.
Ruthless Raducanu 😱
Emma Raducanu storms out to an early lead and takes the first set 6-0 over Rebecca Marino 🔥#BJKCup | @the_LTA pic.twitter.com/IUVH128D1L
— Billie Jean King Cup (@BJKCup) November 17, 2024
“She doesn’t have to change too many things. There comes a point where you need to put that game on the court for six months and get the results.
“I genuinely think that lessons have been learned and she’s going to fly high.”
Although Raducanu can sometimes be an easy target for criticism, Petchy does believe she deserves more understanding from the public.
Her rise was quick and meteoric and brought with it a lot of challenges. Many just see the benefits, such as the big endorsement deals that came her way almost overnight, but Patchy says the mental challenges are also significant.
But, again, he believes that can only be solved by playing regular tennis.
“The lack of matches at the top level and the stress and the emotional stress will have a potential impact on her picking up injuries and I think that that’s where the lessons are learned,” he said.
“The more times you’re outside the arena and not playing in stressful situations, there is going to be a tendency to get more injured when you go back into those because you’re going to push yourself harder.
“You can do all of those things in practice, but it’s never quite the same as when you do matches and you’re trying to compete for Grand Slam titles which Emma will be doing in the not-too-distant future.
“There has to be a correlation between not playing enough matches and some of the injuries that she’s unfortunately picked up.”
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