Centre Court takes centre stage at Wimbledon<\/p>\n
It’s hard to stress just how much of a spotlight gets thrust on British players during Wimbledon, one of the sport’s four majors and – arguably – the most famous tennis tournament in the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n
With Jack Draper<\/a>, who made the US Open semi-finals in 2024 and won the Indian Wells Masters last year, still struggling with a plethora of injuries, the attention and focus on Raducanu will be white hot as The Championships get underway.<\/p>\n But the Brit handled such a microscope extremely well a year ago, winning two rounds before giving world No. 1\u00a0Aryna Sabalenka<\/a> everything she could handle – and more – in a third-round, middle weekend\u00a0battle on Centre Court<\/a> and made for primetime viewing across the country.<\/p>\n “I fought for every point like crazy,” Sabalenka would say afterwards.\u00a0<\/p>\n Having ridden the global tennis roller-coaster – and faced the pressures that go along with it – over the last five years, Raducanu’s Queen’s run could come in particular use at the All England Club.<\/p>\n “You know, playing at home, there is no feeling like it,” she said after her loss to Vekic. “I was so just in awe of the atmosphere and in awe of the support I received all week. I couldn’t really believe it.<\/p>\n “Even though I know I’m playing at home, it just trumps anything that you ever really think of.”<\/p>\n She added: “For that, I’m really grateful, and I just see how many people are behind me and rooting for me. It means a lot, because the results don’t always go your way the whole season. You see things written about you or spoken about you… but when you play at home, you’re just reminded how much support there is actually for you. It means a lot to have that.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Centre Court takes centre stage at Wimbledon It’s hard to stress just how much of a spotlight gets…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":274046,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-274045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274045\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/274046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}