NOTTINGHAM, England – The moment the grass-court season begins to mean something, the draw has a way of finding Emma Raducanu. Released on Saturday, the Nottingham Open bracket handed the British No. 1 a wildcard entry and then, in quick succession, a possible second-round rematch with the woman she beat to win the 2021 US Open and a potential quarter-final against the reigning Wimbledon champion. If the Queen’s Club week was Raducanu’s declaration that she has returned, Nottingham is where the claim gets examined.
Raducanu will open her campaign against a qualifier – an assignment that carries its own quiet pressure for a player who, in 2021, became the first qualifier in the sport’s history to win a Grand Slam singles title. Should she advance, the draw projects a second-round encounter with Leylah Fernandez, the Canadian who took Raducanu to three sets at the US Open final before losing 6-4, 6-3, 6-3. The two have not played each other since. That match in Flushing Meadows carries an almost mythological weight now, five years on, and the prospect of a Nottingham rematch is the kind of storyline the grass swing rarely generates outside of Wimbledon fortnight.
What arrives in the quarter-finals, if Raducanu gets there, is a different kind of difficulty: Barbora Krejcikova, the Czech eighth seed who won Wimbledon in 2024, is projected to cross Raducanu’s path in the last eight. Krejcikova is currently in the midst of a career resurgence on British grass, having reached the Libema Open final in the Netherlands on Sunday. She has played only a handful of tournaments in 2026, managing her way back from a prolonged injury period, but her grass-court credentials are not in question. She is a different opponent entirely from anyone Raducanu faced in London.
The context matters. Raducanu’s week at the HSBC Championships at Queen’s Club – where she faces Donna Vekic in Sunday’s final – is the best sustained run of tennis she has produced since her injury-interrupted return to the tour. She defeated Anna Blinkova, Sorana Cirstea, Kamilla Rakhimova and Iva Jovic without dropping a set or being taken to a tiebreak. Against Jovic in the semi-finals on Saturday, she played two matches in a single day after a weather backlog compacted the schedule, winning the second 6-2, 6-2 against the world No. 19. Raducanu described the week as meaning “everything” to her in a post-match interview with the LTA, and called herself “the new Emma.”
That framing will be interrogated at Nottingham. Queen’s Club was a WTA 500 event on a familiar surface in front of a home crowd that treated every Raducanu winner as a civic event. The Nottingham Open, a WTA 250 contested at the Lexus Nottingham Tennis Centre, draws a harder look at the field. Fernandez, a former top-15 player now ranked around 40th, has been quietly assembling a reasonable grass-court record. Krejcikova, when healthy and confident, is among the most tactically complete players on the WTA Tour, capable of neutralising the kind of clean striking that carried Raducanu through London.
Raducanu was not at Nottingham last year. Her most recent appearance at the tournament came in 2024, when she won her opening two matches before benefiting from a quarter-final walkover – compatriot Francesca Jones withdrew with a shoulder injury – and reaching the semi-finals. There, Katie Boulter ended her run 6-7, 6-3, 6-4 in a match that carried its own British-tennis significance, Boulter going on to win the title.
The 2024 result matters for one reason: Boulter, the defending champion that year, progressed past Raducanu and then held the trophy. The 2026 bracket projects a Raducanu-Krejcikova quarter-final, with the semi-finals potentially bringing third seed Emma Navarro or defending champion McCartney Kessler. Whether Raducanu can navigate that sequence depends substantially on how much physical credit she has left after a Queen’s week that required her to play back-to-back matches on Saturday – including an injury scare when she slipped in the quarter-final against Rakhimova.
She gave no public indication of concern. But the schedule compression at Queen’s, followed by an immediate transfer north for a tournament beginning this week, leaves Raducanu less recovery time than she would ordinarily have between a final and a first-round match. The Nottingham draw took no account of any of that.
Raducanu’s coach Andrew Richardson, who guided her through the 2021 US Open qualifying run and has returned to her team this season, has spoken about managing her physical load carefully. The Nottingham bracket does not make that straightforward. A wildcard entry placed in a draw with a former Grand Slam champion in the second round and a Wimbledon winner in the quarter-finals is not a gentle reintroduction to match play after a taxing final weekend. Eastern Herald’s prior reporting on Raducanu’s coaching deficit at the French Open underscored just how critical Richardson’s return has been to steadying her game on the tour.
What is not yet confirmed is whether Krejcikova will commit to Nottingham after Libema. Tournament schedules during the grass swing allow for last-minute withdrawals, and a player who has been managing injury carefully for two years is not obligated to take the bracket at face value. If Krejcikova declines, Raducanu’s projected path clears considerably. If she enters and arrives in form from a Libema title run, the quarter-final in Nottingham will matter more than most WTA 250 matches usually do at this point in the season.
The Fernandez match, if it happens, is its own separate story. The 2021 US Open final produced one of the most unlikely champions the sport has ever seen – a qualifier, ranked 150th, who beat seven opponents in two weeks without losing a set. Fernandez pushed her further than anyone that fortnight. Five years later, both are trying to rebuild. Neither is who she was in Flushing Meadows. The grass at Nottingham has no memory of any of it.
