With a towel wrapped around her shoulders, a downbeat Emma Raducanu gave her most honest press conference in some time after her Australian Open exit.
Raducanu was withering in her assessment of her own game as she lost 7-6(3), 6-2 against Anastasia Potapova in the second round of the opening Grand Slam of the year, with her post-match comments throwing up so many talking points.
While she showed some flashes of promising form in the opening set of the match, she faded badly after losing the tie-break and the manner of her exit left plenty of questions over he fitness levels after a troubled off-season hampered by a foot problem.
Yet the bigger question may now be the direction of her tennis, as she gave a broad hint that the tactics she deployed against Potapova were not effective.
That will inevitably spark a debate around the future of her coach, Francisco Roig, with the British press quick to suggest the 2021 US Open champion may be pondering another change in her set-up.
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“I think I’m going to take a few days, get back home and try and just re-evaluate my game a bit,” she said.
“Watch it back, see where I can improve. What I have been feeling and also what is visually apparent. I definitely want to feel better on certain shots before I start playing again.
“I want to be playing a different way, and I think the misalignment with how I’m playing right now and how I want to be playing is something that I just want to work on.
“At the end of the day, I just want to hit the ball to the corners and hard. I feel like I’m doing all this variety, and it’s not doing what I want it to do. I need to just work on playing in a way more similar to how I was playing when I was younger.”
That suggests the power game that fired Raducanu to her US Open win is still her favoured way of playing, with Roig’s eagerness to add drop shots and subtlety to her game not giving her the impact she needs.
Riot’s approach to inject variety in Raducanu’s appeared to have plenty of merit, as she has been blown away by some of the bigger hitters in women’s tennis over the last couple of years and needed to come up with a Plan B.
Yet history suggests that Raducanu can look for an alternative tactical plan when she suffers a big defeat and it will be interesting to see how she reflects on her time with Roig once the disappointment of her Australian Open exit fades.
“I don’t want to give myself too much of a hard time because I know my preparation going into this tournament. I kind of have to leave with my head held high because of the matches I’ve had here.
“I didn’t even know at the beginning if I would be coming to Australia, so it’s a positive in that sense.
“I don’t regret the decision, because I got to come and play a slam here. Even if I wasn’t very ready, I think I had a good three weeks Down Under on and off the court.
“I just need to take it for what it is, be pragmatic, and go back and keep working. The season is still quite long so, hopefully, if I stay healthy, do the right things, then it will start falling into place.”
Raducanu will look to regroup and pick up some valuable ranking points in WTA 1000 events in Doha and Dubai, with the brutally honest comments she offered up after her defeat at the Australian Open suggesting she may be contemplating more changes as she plots her story in 2026.
READ NEXT: Everything Emma Raducanu said in candid press conference after her Australian Open exit
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