If you were wondering what all the fuss was about, Emma Raducanu provided a timely reminder. Her 6-4, 6-1 victory over world No 36 Marie Bouzkova felt like the closest thing we have seen – in terms of fearless shotmaking – to her US Open miracle.
Since that New York breakthrough, Raducanu’s journey has taken in more snakes than ladders. Injuries, unstable coaching arrangements, technical rejigs: it was as if a series of sinkholes kept opening up around her. Some of us may have forgotten, amid the growing pains, how much fun she can be to watch.
Happily, anyone following the Mubadala Abu Dhabi Open would have been reminded of Raducanu’s original virtues: clean ball-striking, silky movement and a terrific tennis IQ.
The match did not get off to the most auspicious start for Raducanu, as she walloped a laser-like forehand on the opening point and came dashing forward, only to stumble and dump her volley into the net.
Over the next 82 minutes, however, she would improve dramatically, maintaining the ambition and intensity of her groundstrokes while gradually cutting out the silly errors that marred the opening exchanges.
Raducanu looked stressed early on, making gestures of frustration to her childhood coach Nick Cavaday. But she did not stop trying to force the pace against her game but limited opponent.
Trailing 2-4 after 25 minutes, she suddenly found her first serve, and from then on she was utterly dominant. In a hot streak that recalled her New York best, she won 10 of the next 11 games and left Bouzkova bemused.
“In the beginning I was just adjusting to the speed of the court,” Raducanu told on-court interviewer Monica Puig. “It was pretty quick and a lot more still than it had been for the week, because it had been very windy, so it was a different tempo.
“Marie is a really tough opponent,” she added. “I knew going in that I was going to have to play so many balls, and I think in the beginning I was missing a few of the finishing shots but I cleaned that up, so I’m very happy about that.”
The stats show how much Raducanu improved over the course of the match – and how powerless Bouzkova became. Raducanu’s tallies of clean winners were roughly equal (12 and 11) over the two sets, but her unforced-error count dropped from 13 to just three as she began to relax into the flow of her own game.
With Bouzkova increasingly struggling to win points, let alone games, this match was never going to extend to three sets – and a good thing too. Tending to fade in long contests, Raducanu wins only 40 per cent of deciders. (At the 2021 US Open, you may remember, she never had to play one.)
Unusual in its freedom, this was Raducanu’s first win over top-100 opposition since she overcame Beatriz Haddad Maia in Indian Wells last March. But it wasn’t the result that made an impression so much as the swagger. Raducanu played as if she believed completely in her ability, which has not always been the case over the past couple of seasons. The decision to reunite with Cavaday, who cheered her on from the sidelines, is looking well-judged.
The next round – which Raducanu will probably play on Wednesday – is an intriguing one. Her opponent is the second seed Ons Jabeur, whose Arab ancestry makes her the nearest thing the Middle-East has to a homegrown tennis star, even though she actually hails from Tunisia.
Jabeur received a first-round bye and thus has only scored one victory this season, which came against world No 150 Yuliia Starodubtseva at the Australian Open. In her second round in Melbourne, Jabeur was utterly bamboozled by 16-year-old Mirra Andreeva, and tallied only two games. In truth, she has been struggling for form ever since she laid an egg – to use John McEnroe’s vivid term for a disastrous underperformance – in last summer’s Wimbledon final.
“I really like Ons,” said Raducanu after the Bouzkova win. “She’s someone who has kind of taken me under her wing as I’ve been new to the tour. I’m really looking forward to it because a lot of people were saying to me ‘Ons, Ons, Ons,’ and I was like, ‘I’m playing Marie, who’s ranked like 30 in the world. So that’s not an easy match.’ But yeah, I’m really pleased to have put myself in this situation. And yeah, I’m going out with nothing to lose against her.”