Emma Raducanu has brought Mark Petchey back into her coaching set-up on an informal basis before the Indian Wells Open.
The British No1 worked with Petchey for four months in 2025 before hiring Rafael Nadal’s former coach Francisco Roig in August. Raducanu split from the Spaniard after her second-round exit at the Australian Open in January and said she wanted to return to the “super-aggressive” brand of tennis that underpinned her US Open victory in 2021.
Her hitting partner Alexis Canter has since acted as her de facto coach, with their partnership showing early signs of promise when the 23-year-old reached her first WTA Tour final since that 2021 success in Romania this month. But Raducanu was swept aside in the final by Sorana Cirstea and a stubborn chest infection then derailed her momentum. She retired during her first-round match in Qatar before she was defeated by the lucky loser Antonia Ruzic in the Dubai opening round in a “very difficult” Middle East swing.
Raducanu said at the unveiling of her £2.6million sponsorship deal with Uniqlo on Tuesday that she was not “actively looking for a coach”, adding: “Right now I have Alexis in my corner. He knows me as a person. He knows me as a player. And I’ve actually had some success with him in the past year in Washington [where she beat Naomi Osaka] and Cluj … so it’s going well.”
The pair enjoyed some good results last year but ended their partnership because of his media work, with Raducanu then appointing Roig, her ninth coach since 2021
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However, it is understood that Petchey will join Raducanu on court for her practice sessions in Indian Wells, alongside the 55-year-old’s broadcast commitments with the Tennis Channel. It is unclear if the arrangement could extend beyond the first act of the “Sunshine double” — the Miami Open quickly follows in mid-March — but Canter is expected to remain a key part of Raducanu’s team and sit in her boxes during matches.
Speaking about Raducanu on the Tennis Channel’s Big T podcast in January, Petchey said: “Emma and I never fell out. It just got to the point where I felt I couldn’t be the No1 coach [due to his media commitments]. We still chat, we’re still in good communication, she’ll still run some stuff past me. I’ll help her for ever. I’ll take a bullet for her.”
Raducanu has hired nine different coaches since reaching the fourth round at Wimbledon in 2021 but Petchey’s return is likely to accelerate her return to old ways rather than implement any radical changes. Although Raducanu was criticised for consigning another coach to the scrapheap after her error-strewn loss against Anastasia Potapova in Melbourne, she was not alone on the tennis circuit in thinking Roig’s remodelling of her forehand and his emphasis on her playing with more variety was taking her down the wrong path.
Petchey said last month: “We still chat, she’ll run stuff past me. I’ll help her for ever. I’ll take a bullet for her”
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“I just want to hit the ball to the corners and hard. I need to just work on playing in a way more similar to how I was playing when I was younger. I always just changed direction, took the ball early and went for it,” Raducanu said after that loss, before reiterating on Tuesday: “The rapport [with Roig] was great. I think in the end, we just weren’t aligning on certain key aspects.”
Petchey, who guided a young Andy Murray into the world’s top 50, knows Raducanu’s strengths well, having first worked with her in 2020 at the National Tennis Centre before reuniting with her in March last year. The pair enjoyed some positive results, with Raducanu reaching the third round at Wimbledon — a run that included a win over the former champion Marketa Vondrousova before an impressive performance, albeit in vain, against the world No1 Aryna Sabalenka.
Along with her forehand and tactical approach, one area Raducanu may want to address is her serve. She changed her starting position three times between the 2024 and 2025 Australian Opens alone, conceding at one stage it “has a mind of its own”. That proved still to be the case in her last outing against Ruzic when Raducanu made only 58 per cent of her first serves, along with conceding seven double faults, although her serve did improve notably in the deciding set.
Reflecting on Raducanu’s career in August, Petchey said: “From my perspective, I hope people can really understand how much she loves tennis. She’s totally invested in it. She watches it all the time. She practises as hard as anyone I know and has spent more time on the court, or as much time on the court, as everybody else. And obviously she’s living a very different life.
Raducanu split with Roig because he tried to bring more variety to her game, while she wanted to return to the “super-aggressive” tennis that won her the 2021 US Open — and Petchey’s presence could help that
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“She’s living a lot of her career in reverse and that’s not been easy. Having set the bar so high so early on in your career, every week you are measured not just by other people’s expectations but also your own expectations.
“That is a good thing because it drives you to be as good as you can be. But on the other hand it’s difficult, because at times it can feel like you’re not hitting the standard you want to because that’s where your bar is at.
“From that perspective, her work ethic and her desire to be able to do what she did back in 2021 is as great as I remember in 2020, when I first had a chance to work with her.”