There is a moment from the 2026 Australian Open that tells you almost everything you need to know about where Emma Raducanu is right now as a tennis player, and more importantly, as someone who consistently gets in her own way. During her United Cup match against Maria Sakkari, Francisco Roig had been instructing her to add variety and to think tactically.<\/p>\n
At the start of the second set, Raducanu appeared to decide she had heard enough. She stopped listening, started swinging freely, and played a great set. She then lost the match. That sequence, in miniature, is the entire Raducanu story. She gets advice from accomplished, experienced coaches. She rejects it when it conflicts with what she already believes. And then she wonders why the results are not coming.<\/p>\n
Four and a half years have passed since Raducanu produced one of the most extraordinary individual achievements in the history of tennis, winning the US Open as a qualifier without dropping a set. She was 18 years old, ranked outside the top 150, and she played the tournament of her life. Since then, she has cycled through coach after coach, accumulated a record that falls well short of her ability, and offered explanations for each departure that consistently locate the problem everywhere except where it actually lives.<\/p>\n
She is now searching for her tenth coach in five years, with the longest single coaching relationship of her professional career lasting just 13 months. The question is no longer whether there is a pattern. There clearly is. The question is whether she will ever acknowledge it honestly enough to change it.<\/p>\n
Can Emma Raducanu learn from past mistakes?
\nWhat She Has Done Wrong<\/p>\n
The coaching carousel has been well documented, but the sheer scale of it still demands spelling out. After winning the US Open with Andrew Richardson by her side, Raducanu chose not to extend their arrangement less than two weeks after the victory. She then worked with Torben Beltz, Dmitry Tursunov, Sebastian Sachs, Nick Cavaday, Vladimir Platenik for a fortnight, Mark Petchey, and Francisco Roig in rapid succession.<\/p>\n
Tursunov, notably, later stated he had seen red flags in her camp that he felt could not be ignored for a long-term commitment. Each departure has been announced with a warm Instagram post and the implication that the split was mutual and amicable. The cumulative picture is considerably less tidy.\u00a0The Roig departure is particularly damning, because Roig was not a mediocre hire. He had been a central part of Rafael Nadal\u2019s coaching team for years, and landing him was widely viewed as a sign that Raducanu was finally serious about building something substantive. What actually happened was different.<\/p>\n
Roig\u2019s approach involved adding drop shots, variations in spin, and even experimenting with new rackets as he tried to give Raducanu the tactical range to compete with the best players in the world. This is sound, sophisticated coaching. Sabalenka, Swiatek and Rybakina are not players you can simply out-hit in a straight exchange. You need variety, disguise, and the ability to change patterns under pressure. Roig knew this. He had spent years watching Nadal do exactly that.<\/p>\n
Raducanu, however, had other ideas. After her loss to Potapova in Melbourne, she was explicit: she wanted to revert to hitting the ball to the corners and hard, playing in a way more similar to when she was younger. That is not a tactical adjustment. That is a 23-year-old rejecting the professional judgement of one of the most decorated coaches in the sport because she prefers to do what she has always done.<\/p>\n
The forehand Roig had been working on, with a higher and longer takeback designed to generate more spin, was visibly present against Potapova and visibly not working. She hit 19 forehand unforced errors in two sets, landing just 70% of her forehand returns compared to 96% from Potapova. She had not trusted the shot enough to make it work, which is the inevitable consequence of only half-committing to what a coach is trying to build.<\/p>\n
The telling detail, offered in her own post-match comments, was this: when asked why she looked over to Roig less and less during the match, she explained that she had realised the best way to deal with tricky situations was to find the answers from within, and that looking over brought more negativity. She had, in other words, already mentally checked out of the coaching relationship while the tournament was still in progress. Roig was gone a week later.<\/p>\n
She has also said, with considerable confidence, that it was never her interest or philosophy to chop and change coaches, and that she is a very loyal person who eats the same things every single day. When you compare that to the fact it does not look pretty. Ten coaches in five years is not loyalty. Not now, not yesterday, not ever.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What She Needs to Do<\/p>\n
The answer is not complicated, even if the execution clearly is. What Raducanu needs is to find a high-quality coach and then actually listen to them, not just in the honeymoon period when the relationship feels good and the results are ticking along, but through the difficult stretches when the advice conflicts with instinct. Every great player has had to do this at some point. It is the fundamental act of trusting someone else\u2019s expertise over your own comfort zone.<\/p>\n
The Aryna Sabalenka comparison is instructive here. In 2020, Sabalenka hired Anton Dubrov, who at the time was 25 years old and barely known. Six years later they are still together. Under Dubrov, Sabalenka has reached eight Grand Slam finals since 2023 and won four, and has held the world #1 ranking since October 2024. Dubrov was not famous when Sabalenka chose him. He was not a big name she could announce on social media. He was simply the right person, and she gave him the time and trust to prove it. Andy Murray spent six years with Ivan Lendl. Serena Williams had Patrick Mouratoglou for a decade. Novak Djokovic\u2019s best years came under the tutelage of Marian Vajda.<\/p>\n
The single common thread in every sustained period of excellence in modern tennis is a long-term coaching relationship in which the player trusts the process even when it is uncomfortable. Raducanu\u2019s best stretch of form in recent memory came under Mark Petchey, under whom she reached the Miami Open quarterfinal and put together her most consistent tennis of her career. The reason that relationship could not be formalised was not a breakdown in trust or a falling-out over tactics. Petchey simply had television commitments that meant he could not be a full-time coach, and even he has said publicly he would take a bullet for her. That is the kind of relationship that produces results. She had it, and she could not find a way to sustain it.<\/p>\n
What she needs to do is hire someone of genuine quality, agree a framework with them about the direction her game needs to develop, and then honour that framework even when individual results are disappointing. She needs to stop evaluating her coaching relationship after every tournament and start measuring it over years, not weeks. Sometimes you gotta accept that adding variety to your game is not an insult to your instincts, but the only realistic pathway to competing consistently with the players above you.<\/p>\n
She Won\u2019t<\/p>\n
The conclusion to all of this, and the reason the title of this piece is stated with such certainty, is that Raducanu has now had five years of opportunities to change her approach and has not taken any of them. That is simply a disposition.<\/p>\n
She is not unintelligent. She is clearly reflective and self-analytical to a degree that many players are not. But there is a specific intelligence that involves recognising the limits of your own perspective and deferring to someone who knows more than you in a particular domain, and that quality appears to be in short supply.<\/p>\n
She has said herself that she asks her coaches a lot of questions, and that on certain occasions they have not been able to keep up with the questions she has asked, and that perhaps that is why things ended. This framing reveals more than she perhaps intends. The relationship between a player and a coach is not a seminar in which the player grades the coach\u2019s intellectual performance. It is a collaboration that requires the player to implement things they do not yet fully understand, on the basis of trust built over time.<\/p>\n
After the Roig split, rather than seek a replacement of comparable standing, Raducanu insisted she was happy working only with Alexis Canter, a hitting partner who reached a career high ranking of 779. What do you even write about that? This is the choice of someone who, at some level, does not want to be told what to do by a voice with the authority to challenge her. Canter cannot challenge her. A player ranked 779 does not carry the authority to push back against a Grand Slam champion\u2019s instincts. That is precisely why the arrangement is comfortable.<\/p>\n
Patrick Mouratoglou, arguably one of the sharpest coaching minds in the sport, has been blunt about what the pattern means. He has said that constant coaching changes mean the project changes every time, and that you cannot build something without stability, because the tour is already the most unstable thing on the planet. He is right. Every coach who comes in starts from scratch on the technical and tactical work. Nothing accumulates. Nothing compounds. Raducanu resets, re-evaluates, and reaches the same conclusion she always reaches, that the previous coach was not quite right and the next one might be.<\/p>\n
She is 23 years old, which means there is still time, in theory. Her talent is not in question. But talent is not sufficient when the psychological infrastructure around it is this resistant to outside input. The players who have built lasting careers at the top of the game have all, at some point, surrendered something to their coaches.<\/p>\n
They have implemented shots they were not convinced by, played in ways that felt unnatural, and trusted someone else\u2019s map of where their game needed to go. Raducanu, by contrast, appears to treat every coaching relationship as provisional until the moment it asks her to do something she does not already want to do, at which point it stops being the right fit.<\/p>\n
People rarely change. Not in the ways that matter. They can change their diet, their training habits, their schedule, their team. What they almost never change is the fundamental orientation toward the world that generates their decisions. Raducanu\u2019s orientation is one of a player who believes, at the deepest level, that she already knows best. Four and a half years of evidence has done nothing to shift that belief. A tenth coach will not shift it either.<\/p>\n
Main photo credit: Geoff Burke-Imagn Images<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There is a moment from the 2026 Australian Open that tells you almost everything you need to know…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":586796,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[60834,1701,54405,99,428],"class_list":{"0":"post-586795","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-dmitry-tursunov","9":"tag-emma-raducanu","10":"tag-francisco-roig","11":"tag-sports","12":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586795","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=586795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586795\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/586796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=586795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=586795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=586795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}