Emma Raducanu has posted some new images of her training sessions at the LTA’s National Tennis Centre in London – and she will be hoping her preparations will soon be stepped up on American soil.
The 2021 US Open champion has slipped down to No 252 in the latest WTA rankings after missing most of last year due to injury.
That leaves her relying on wildcards to get into the game’s biggest tournaments and she should get those as a former Grand Slam champion.
Raducanu has a ‘protected ranking’ of No 103 as that was the point she dropped out of the game last year to undergo surgery on both ankles and her wrist, but that is not high enough to get her into the game’s biggest events.
While the 21-year-old has shown flashes of top-level form after making her comeback to the WTA Tour in Aukland last month, she has struggled to string together victories and turned in a poor performance in a 6-0 7-6(6) defeat against Anhelina Kalinina in the opening round of the Qatar Open earlier this month.
Raducanu confirmed she would reconsider her schedule after that match, as she returned to the UK to train rather than play in the WTA 1000 tournament in Dubai, where she could have had a wild card.
“I think that I need to kind of schedule my tournaments a bit better as well as just trying to get some more matches under my belt,” she stated.
“I think that I’m just going to go home and practice and we’ll see where it goes from there.”
Now the waiting game is on for Raducanu to discover whether she will get a wildcard into the WTA 1000 event at Indian Wells next month and even though her lowly ranking does suggest she justifies entry into the 128-player draw, she is likely to be offered the chance to play in the Californian desert.
