LONDON — There was a moment in Paris that Annabel Croft could not get out of her head. Emma Raducanu, ranked 46th in the world and one of the most naturally gifted ball-strikers in the women’s game, was dumping shots into the bottom of the net and sending others wide. Her serve was misfiring. Her footwork, normally so precise, looked uncertain. She lost the opening set 0–6 without winning a single game.
It was not just the scoreline that alarmed Croft, herself a former British No. 1. It was what it revealed about the 23-year-old’s confidence. Speaking during BBC Sport’s coverage of the HSBC Championships at Queen’s Club on Tuesday, Croft offered an unusually direct assessment of Raducanu’s first-round defeat to world No. 68 Solana Sierra at Roland Garros.
“I think the match she played at Roland Garros was probably one of the lower levels I have ever seen her play at,” Croft said. “It looked to me like she had zero confidence. Balls were landing at the bottom of the net, and she was swinging, and it was going wide and out the back.”
That is a remarkable verdict from someone who has watched Raducanu closely throughout her career. There have been rough patches before — early exits, injury withdrawals, the long quiet months when illness kept her off the Tour entirely. But a complete collapse of the technical fundamentals, from an athlete Croft describes as a “beautiful tennis player and mover” who normally makes the game look easy, was something different.
“Normally you watch her, and you will marvel at how beautiful she makes the strokes look,” Croft said. “She is never lunging at balls and off balance. But there is an awful lot of players now coming out onto the Tour. If you are not moving forward, you are actually going backwards. It’s just cutthroat.”
The numbers from Raducanu’s Roland Garros campaign tell a narrow story. She played just two matches on clay in 2026 — a first-round loss to Diane Parry in Strasbourg and then the Sierra defeat — and lost both without winning a set. Her first-serve percentage against Sierra was 58 percent, and she won only 48 percent of those first-serve points. She committed five double faults. The serve, which became a weapon during her 2021 US Open run, was, in Croft’s words, “a bit all over the place.”
Context matters here. Raducanu contracted a post-viral illness during the Middle East swing in February and missed tournaments in Miami, Linz, Madrid, and Rome as a result. She arrived in Strasbourg having not played a Tour match since Indian Wells in March. The match sharpness deficit was real. But Croft’s concern goes deeper than a rust problem, and she is right to frame it that way. Match fitness explains a first-round defeat. It does not fully explain why one of the most technically accomplished players on the circuit was hitting balls into the net at a rate that alarmed a seasoned BBC commentator.
“I think it has not been great having so much chopping and changing,” Croft said, pivoting to the coaching question that has followed Raducanu for most of her post-2021 career. “A lot of people on the Tour now say, ‘Who has the best teams in place? Who has the best trainer, and nutritionist, and data analyst, and strength and conditioning coach?’ If you can invest in your team to have the best information, it allows you to flourish on the tennis court. I feel like a lot of time has been lost in that department.”
That time cannot be reclaimed. Raducanu has cycled through coaching stints with Nigel Sears, Richardson, Torben Beltz, Dmitry Tursunov, Sebastian Sachs, Nick Cavaday, Francisco Roig, and others in the five years since she lifted the US Open trophy at Flushing Meadows. Each change reset the accumulation of tactical and technical work. The players who have overtaken her in the rankings — the rising names like Victoria Mboko and Iva Jovic that Croft mentioned by name — have not been cycling through entire coaching staffs every six months.
The reunion with Richardson, who oversaw that 2021 run without dropping a set through qualifying and the main draw, was announced before the clay-court season. Raducanu has framed it in terms of trust. “He’s known me since I was young, I trust him,” she told reporters ahead of Queen’s Club. “I believe in him and he believes in me.” They have yet to win a match together in this second spell, a record that will be tested immediately: Raducanu faces Russia’s Anna Blinkova in the first round on Centre Court at the HSBC Championships on Tuesday.
Croft acknowledged the logic of the Richardson reunion. “I think it’s wonderful he wanted to come back,” she said, “and clearly I think they are trying to ignite what she had at the US Open.” But she added the caveat that has defined the entire debate around Raducanu’s post-Slam career: the Tour has moved on considerably since 2021. The players who were teenagers when she won that title are now seasoned professionals with deep support teams, accumulated match miles, and tactical sophistication developed through years of consistent coaching relationships.
The grass-court season is, at least, Raducanu’s natural habitat. She reached the fourth round at Wimbledon in both 2021 and 2024. Queen’s Club, where she was a quarter-finalist at last year’s inaugural WTA 500 event, suits her aggressive baseline game and her instinct to shorten points. Serena Williams has drawn significant attention to the fortnight, but the more consequential question at Queen’s is whether Raducanu — starting against a qualifier on her own country’s most historic grass court — can find something resembling the level that made Croft so enthusiastic about her prospects five years ago.
What no one on the BBC commentary team or in the stands at Queen’s Club can yet answer is whether the technical collapse in Paris was a product of illness and inactivity, or something more stubborn. Croft, for her part, stopped short of a definitive verdict. She noted Raducanu’s qualities at length, described her as a big-match player who loves a stage, and spoke of the hope attached to Richardson’s return. The worry was implicit in the gap between that description and what she actually watched on Court Philippe-Chatrier last month. The grass will start to answer it.
