Raducanu making a tactical gamble to prioritise SW19
Emma Raducanu has a plan, a plan that if it works will reestablish her as the darling of British tennis.
If it fails, she will have skipped one of the slams for nothing. Success, ultimately, would be winning Wimbledon. But a return to the second week would be enough to justify her shunning of the French Open.
Raducanu, 22, pulled out of the clay court major last week.
She had requested a wildcard after failing to qualify for the tournament on ranking but missed out – all six available went to French players – and did not choose to play the qualifying event. “It’s important for me to keep laying on the foundations and I will use the time to do a healthy block before the grass and subsequent hard court seasons to give myself a chance to keep fit for the rest of the year,” she said.
There was no mention of an injury. The suspicion is she was worried about being schooled again as she was by little-known Maria Lourdes Carle in Madrid. “She was probably hoping that she was just going to get straight into main draw,” Tim Henman, a French Open semi-finalist, tells i. “If she just wants to continue to build fitness, and then get ready for the grass, then that’s her prerogative. I wouldn’t read too much into it.
“She’s played some great tennis on clay, Billie Jean King Cup and Stuttgart. But she’s going to be even better on on grass so I would be focusing on that.”
Raducanu has announced she will play Nottingham, the WTA tournament that starts the day after the French Open on 10 June. She is entered in Birmingham the week after, but will need a wildcard to get in, while Eastbourne the week before Wimbledon is also an option. She is extremely unlikely to play all three, understandably cautious not to overload 12 months on from injuries that required three surgeries. Instead, she will work with coach Nick Cavaday and Britain’s head of women’s tennis Iain Bates to peak at exactly the right time. The intention will be to produce her best tennis at Wimbledon, the tournament where she made her breakthrough three years ago by reaching the fourth round. Raducanu’s days involve double gym sessions and double tennis sessions, having moved from hard-court work to grass this week. In that sense, there is a kind of logic to skipping three weeks of clay-court tennis, the surface that is the least like the slick grass courts of Wimbledon.
But British No 1 Katie Boulter would not agree. In fact, she believes her work on the red dirt, where she has only played five tour-level matches in her whole career, is making her a better player overall.
“[Clay] is a bit of a leveller. You can’t really get any cheap points here and there,” Boulter said.
“So a lot of my weapons can be equalised and I have to find different ways and more creative ways of actually winning matches.” Henman too (above), whose serve-and-volley style could not have been less suited to
I will use the time to do a healthy block before the grass and hard court seasons to give myself a chance to keep fit
you’re probably looking at Real Madrid versus Liverpool. And who wouldn’t want to watch that game? “If you look at the quality of Toulouse and Leinster, the history they have in the competition, the rugby that they play, the excitement levels they bring and the X-factor individuals in each team – there are at least five reasons to watch it.
“It has the potential to be a game for the ages, such is the quality of these two teams and it is very hard to call. Probably just favourites in Toulouse, but it’s marginal.” Leinster are chock-full of Ireland’s Six Nations winners of the last two seasons, and wing James Lowe jointly leads this season’s Champions Cup try charts with Bordeaux Bègles’ Louis Bielle-Biarrey, on six, one ahead of Toulouse’s wing Matthis Lebel, scrum-half Antoine Dupont and hooker Peato Mauvaka.
Dupont has made 110 carries in this season’s Champions Cup – 19 more than any other player.
The 27-year-old captain of the record five-time European champions, missed the Six Nations to try out for his country’s Olympic sevens team – but he has been available throughout Toulouse’s Champions Cup campaign.
“It’s very hard to put your finger on what style of rugby Toulouse play,” O’Driscoll says. “They have got an all-court game, they’ve got the capacity with some of their outside backs to score and create some magnificent eye-catching tries. But then they can stick it up their jumper too, they can maul you over, they can play the power game, they’ve got a great offloading game. So they’re very hard to analyse and put in a particular box.
Ireland international Jamison Gibson-Park (left) and Toulouse’s France talisman Antoine Dupont (right) will clash in Tottenham today. Brian O’Driscoll (below) has tipped his former Dublin club to suffer yet more heartache
“From a Leinster perspective, they don’t have the athletes that other teams have had, particularly the French teams, so they have to play with a bit more width, with a bit more deception, less bludgeon – but they are trying to bring that component into their game via their defence, which has worked pretty well thus far. It’s got them to another final.”
South Africa’s double World Cup-winning coach Jacques Nienaber, long-time right-hand man to Rassie Erasmus, joined Leinster this season and has revamped their defence.
Leinster scrum-half Jamison Gibson-Park, another Ireland regular, says: “We’ve put everything in trying to move forward with the arrival of some new coaches, who have changed a lot of things. Jacques has a great personality and gives off positive energy to the squad.
“We hope that our defensive system will make the difference in the final by disrupting a Toulouse team who like to run with the ball.” And yet O’Driscoll agrees with regular observers in Dublin who say Leinster are not quite at the pitch of the last two seasons.
“Yeah, I definitely feel that,” O’Driscoll tells i. “If you look at the quality they produced last year, in particular, they were overwhelming favourites going into the final and came unstuck.
“You look at the quality they’ve produced this year, [it is] still very good. But I don’t think the detail in their attack has been there like it was last year, I don’t think their quality of passing is as good this year as it was last year.
“You look at a new coach coming in and a new defensive system, that obviously has to have taken a huge amount of time and effort and energy. And so it’s very hard to maintain all the other parts to your game, when you’re reinventing the defensive system that you’ve run for a number of years – which wasn’t bad, by the way.
“I don’t want to give them an out by saying it’s a natural thing when you focus on one aspect of the game with so much intensity that something else is going to slip. But I definitely feel as though they’re coming into this final a fraction more under the radar than they have done in the last two years.
“On the back of what we’ve seen thus far, Toulouse are the marginal favourites because of the quality and the scores that they have built and created. Putting Exeter to the sword the way they did [in the quarter-final], the five tries in the first half against Harlequins… it’s just a firepower, it feels like they’re a better version of their 2021 selves when they won [against La Rochelle] at Twickenham.”
Watch Leinster v Toulouse in the Investec Champions Cup final exclusively live on TNT Sports 1 and discovery+ from 1:30pm today. For more info visit tntsports. com