Emma Raducanu was routed from the US Open by Elena Rybakina, and on this evidence the gap between the best of Britain and the best in the world is as wide as Central Park.
With fashion magnate Anna Wintour watching on from her box, Raducanu went down 6-1, 6-2. She has played some excellent tennis at the Grand Slams this season but has never gone beyond the third round, stopped by Iga Swiatek in Melbourne and Paris, by Aryna Sabalenka at Wimbledon and here in New York by No9 seed Rybakina.
That is bad luck, first of all, to run into big guns so early in the draw, but Raducanu has now played a dozen matches against the big four of women’s tennis (the three above mentioned plus Coco Gauff) and has won only a single set.
The matchup against Rybakina looks especially bad, their only previous meeting being a 6-0, 6-1 victory for the Kazakh in Sydney, 2022.
In Raducanu’s first match against a top-10 player at the US Open, her challenge was to make the match about athleticism, rather than power hitting. If she could get Rybakina on the run, she had a chance. But the purity of Rybakina’s ballstriking denied Raducanu any route into the rallies.
But that is not to say Raducanu had no agency in her own downfall – this was by a distance her worst performance of an otherwise excellent hard-court season.
British star Emma Raducanu has today been brutally dumped out of the US Open in the third round
Raducanu went down 6-1, 6-2 to Elena Rybakina as fashion magnate Anna Wintour watched on from the stands
The Kazakh star struggled with her serve on the day, but Raducanu failed to take advantage
Rybakina had a terrible serving day – landing only 47 per cent of her first serves – but Raducanu failed to take advantage. Her return is her best shot, and she was encouraged by her new coach Francis Roig from courtside to go ‘up on the second serve’, but she punched too many into the net.
She has been working on her slice backhand with Roig, and struck it beautifully against Janice Tjen in the second round. That seemed an obvious tactic to disrupt Rybakina’s flow but after the first couple of slices were dispatched Raducanu lost confidence and left the club in her bag.
The match was lost once and for all in the first game of the second set when Raducanu led by 40-0 before making five unforced errors – three on her stronger backhand wing – to concede the break.
It was a horrible sequence. One that gave credence to the worrying suspicion that there is a mental block developing when Raducanu faces the best players in the world.
There is no doubt Raducanu, under coach Roig, is trending in the right direction. But the quest to prove she can tangle with the game’s elite continues.
