No umpires, a manual scoreboard and £75 prize money . . . the humble beginning to Raducanu’s Grand Slam year

The year 2021 was the one in which emma Raducanu’s life would be turned on its head. Not that she or anyone else would have had any inkling of that, based on its first four months. Tennis once again returned to its place on the back burner as she spent the short winter days with her head buried in her books, working towards her A-levels. With people’s lives in the UK so restricted, she made almost no concessions to her future career, bar some training runs around Bromley. her on-court activity at that time was pretty much zero, but as the days became longer and tennis reopened she stepped up her training.

With so little recent tennis behind her it was made known that, to be considered for wildcards into forthcoming grasscourt events, she would need to start playing matches. So, Raducanu and new coach Nigel Sears made the decision to re-enter the competitive fray on May 20, to no fanfare whatsoever, at the three-day British Tour event at the Connaught Club in Chingford, essex.

Along with everyone else, Raducanu dutifully paid her £25 entry fee as she set out to gain some much-needed competitive exposure after an absence of five months. her first opponent of the year was Maddie Brooks, a 23-year-old from Norfolk who was dispatched 6–1, 6–1. After a walkover in the quarter-finals, Raducanu faced Katherine Barnes, one year older than her and with barely any experience of the professional game. To review footage of that match is simply to marvel that one of the participants, just 112 days later, would be lifting the US Open trophy on Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York.

A fairly staggering note is that the week before, in the British Tour event at Woking, Barnes had lost to a 12-year-old.

On the hard courts of the Connaught there were no line judges or ballkids, not even an umpire. The soon-to-be Queen of Flushing Meadows played the match in leggings, and Barnes can be seen manually inputting the points on an old-fashioned flip scoreboard by the net post. In the first set Raducanu repeatedly double-faulted, miscued her groundstrokes and struggled with her opponent’s unorthodox, slapped forehand. Matters improved in the second set but she was to lose the deciding ‘Champions’ tiebreak, going down 6–1, 1–6, 10–8. It would not be unfair to say the whole thing had the feel of a parks match.

The Kent player was to depart with £75 in prize money for making the semis, around £1.8million less than she would be paid fewer than four months later in New York.