LONDON – She had won one match in nearly three months. She had spent two-and-a-half months away from the tour with a post-viral illness. And she had come into the HSBC Championships at Queen’s Club seeded nowhere, ranked 31st, carrying the particular weight of a player who has spent the better part of two years proving to everyone – and perhaps herself – that the US Open girl is still in there somewhere.
By the time Donna Vekic converted her fifth championship point on Sunday afternoon to seal a 6-0, 7-6 (8-6) victory on the Andy Murray Arena, Emma Raducanu had already won something more important than the trophy. Her week at Queen’s, bookended by a flawless 6-0 first set against her on one end and a tiebreak she pushed to 8-6 on the other, produced what her 2026 season had lacked entirely: confirmation that she belongs.
More immediately, it almost certainly secured her a seeded position at Wimbledon. With Raducanu provisionally ranked 31st and Vekic 32nd after the final, both players are now inside the window for Wimbledon seedings. The Grand Slam’s seeding list traditionally covers 32 players, and the Queen’s final was, in a structural sense, a dress rehearsal for a draw that will matter far more. Whether the loss denied Raducanu a single thing about Wimbledon is genuinely unclear – she may well have ended the day better positioned regardless of the scoreline.
That is a paradox worth sitting with. Vekic arrived at Queen’s as a lucky loser – she had lost in qualifying and only reached the main draw after another player’s withdrawal. She is ranked 76th in the world. She went through the tournament on the back of a single match before the final, a brisk 6-1, 6-3 dismantling of Britain’s Katie Boulter. Raducanu, by contrast, had spent two hours and 19 minutes more on court the day before the final than her opponent, having beaten Kamilla Rakhimova and then sixth seed Iva Jovic in back-to-back matches on Saturday after rain compressed the schedule. The numbers almost write the story of the first set themselves.
Vekic was flawless in that opening set. She broke Raducanu three times, dropped just one point on her first serve across the set – a remarkable 11 of 12 – and moved the Briton around the court with a precision that left Raducanu visibly at sea. It was 6-0 in 28 minutes. The crowd in west London, which had roared Raducanu through every close moment of the week, went quiet in the particular way a home crowd goes quiet when it cannot yet decide whether to panic.
What came next is what Raducanu – and Tim Henman, and Andy Richardson, her returned coach who was with her for the 2021 US Open run – will carry into the next two weeks. She broke in the third game of the second set, broke again to lead 5-2, and suddenly the crowd found its voice. Then Vekic, who reached the Wimbledon semi-finals in 2024 and knows exactly what grass feels like under pressure, erased that advantage, broke back twice, and denied Raducanu the chance to serve out the set. The Croatian saved two set points in the 10th game and eventually took the tiebreak 8-6 to claim her fifth career WTA title and her first since 2023.
Raducanu saved three championship points before that tiebreak – a detail that matters not because she eventually lost, but because it shows the specific kind of mental composure that deserted her during the darker spells of 2024 and early 2025. In past years, a 6-0 opening set might have closed the curtain. “That’s not something that in the past years I have always done,” she said afterward, with a plainness that cut through the usual post-match convention.
Henman, speaking to Sky Sports News, had been watching that fight closely. He noted that Raducanu led by a double break and served for the set twice, with set points on her own serve at 5-4. “She’ll be disappointed she didn’t get it into a third set,” he said, “but Vekic is a Wimbledon semi-finalist and has won titles on grass before.” The implicit point was the more interesting one: Raducanu made a Wimbledon semi-finalist work for nearly two hours after being aced in a first set, having played two matches the previous day. The baseline of her physical condition heading into the grass season is, at minimum, no longer in question.
Richardson returned to Raducanu’s corner earlier this season – the reunion with the coach from the Flushing Meadows run carried its own symbolism, and Raducanu acknowledged as much at Queen’s. “I think it’s great to have him back,” she said before the final. “We have been working on this game style. The whole week I have been playing really, really good tennis and the brand of tennis that I really want to play.” She was careful to say the goal is not to rediscover some 2021 version of herself, but something newer: the same aggression, with more experience behind it. What she produced at Queen’s – particularly in the late stretches of the semi-final against Jovic – suggested the work is credible.
The broader question is how the Queen’s run recalibrates the calculus for Wimbledon. The seedings – which Wimbledon adjusts from ATP and WTA rankings using its own grass-court performance formula – are not yet confirmed. The questions about Raducanu’s season had deepened after a difficult French Open, but the trajectory now points in a different direction. What Wimbledon does with the seeding, and what draw position that produces, will determine whether Sunday’s runner-up finish was merely encouraging or actually consequential in an immediate competitive sense.
Vekic, meanwhile, leaves Queen’s with a momentum that is harder to measure than a ranking point total. She had entered the main draw through the side door – a lucky loser whose qualifying defeat suggested she was not quite ready for this surface – and then went undefeated through an entire tournament, dropping just one set. She played one match before the final and was sharper for the rest. Sky Sports reported that the victory lifted her to 32nd in the provisional Wimbledon rankings. Two players who just contested a Queen’s final at the 32nd seed and below: the draw at SW19 will take notice of both of them.
It has been a difficult year for Raducanu outside of this week. She came into Queen’s having won a single match since March. She had missed the better part of three months to illness. The sport had not exactly waited. She played four matches in three days at Queen’s, including two on Saturday, and still pushed the week’s eventual champion to a final-set tiebreak. The part that remains unresolved – the part that Wimbledon will answer – is whether one good week represents a return or a rehearsal. What is certain is that the answer is no longer academic.
