Raducanu made encouraging progress last year, climbing back into the world’s top 30 and playing more matches than in any previous season of her career.<\/p>\n
However, the off-season technical work she planned to put in with coach Francisco Roig – who helped Rafael Nadal win 16 of his 22 major titles – was compromised by a foot injury.<\/p>\n
When Raducanu returned in 2026, a tweak to her forehand – a higher and longer takeback, designed to add more spin – was clear.<\/p>\n
But she seemed to lack trust in the shot against Potapova, landing 70% of her forehand returns in – compared to 96% from her opponent – and making 19 unforced errors off that wing.<\/p>\n
“I want to be playing a different way. The misalignment with how I’m playing right now and how I want to be playing is something I want to work on,” Raducanu said.<\/p>\n
“There are definitely pockets of me playing how I want to play, and it comes out in flashes, which is a positive. But it’s not how I want to be consistently.<\/p>\n
“It’s not going to fall into place straight away, but the more I work on how I want to be playing, it will be more of my identity every time I step onto the court.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Raducanu made encouraging progress last year, climbing back into the world’s top 30 and playing more matches than…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":420788,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":{"0":"post-420787","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=420787"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420787\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/420788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=420787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=420787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=420787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}