Emma Raducanu overcomes error-strewn display to claim first win in 48 days
Forty-eight days after Emma Raducanu’s last victory on the tour, she finally has another – and both wins happened to come against the same opponent: 22-year-old American college graduate Peyton Stearns.
On Tuesday, these two young players fought out a sweaty, tense and unpredictable match in the opening round of the WTA 500 event in Seoul.
Despite some excellent points here and there, it wasn’t the cleanest of contests, with the combined total of unforced errors running to a hefty 110 in just two sets.
But Raducanu showed no little grit to edge through in a pair of tie-breaks: 7-6, 7-6. On a physical level, she must have been desperate to avoid a deciding set, because those first two had already occupied a draining two hours and 43 minutes.
“I don’t think either of us were playing particularly great tennis,” said Raducanu, who will now face China’s Yue Yuan in the second round on Thursday. “It was more of a dogfight. The conditions were very humid so it was a tough two sets. If it had gone to three it would have been very interesting. Peyton has had a lot more tennis under her belt than me in the last couple of months so I am just proud of finding a way.”
In her on-court interview, Raducanu also explained that “the balls were bouncing around all over the place”, which might seem like a prerequisite for this sport. What she meant was that the courts were lively, setting up a lot of high rallies that favoured Stearns’s heavy top-spin.
“It jumps a lot off the court and gets very high,” Raducanu clarified in the interview room after the match “It felt like playing at altitude a little bit. I lost my rhythm on serve, and everything followed from that. It just became ‘Who’s gonna tough it out and win the mental battle?’ None of us were particularly happy with the way we were playing but some matches are like that.
“At 5-6 down [in set two], I was struggling to get the ball in the court. I was just like ‘If I’m gonna lose the set, I’m gonna hit the ball, because this is kind of miserable the way I’m playing right now, so just go for it.’ I think I won seven points in a row. I was just aiming to dictate the first shot so that she wasn’t able to hit so spinny and so high. In the tie-break I think I was just caring less to be honest and it paid off.”
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