Emma Raducanu offered no excuses for her 6-1 6-0 defeat to Iga Swiatek at the Australian Open as she targets improvement on her serve.
It was a bad day at the office for the former US Open champion as she only won one game against a clinical Iga Swiatek at the Australian Open.
Although this was Raducanu’s first tournament of the season, the Brit offered no excuses for a dismal display, “But I think today, no excuses of the back or physically. Yeah, I didn’t play well. She played very well. I think, given the preparation we had, we have to be grateful to be in this position,” Raducanu stated in her press conference.
“I think today, credit to Iga, she played good tennis, but I think it was a little bit of her playing well and me not playing so well. That combination is probably not good and resulted in today. I think she played very well, but I also think that I didn’t play very well, so… I mean, it’s just not a great combination.
“Of course, if a top player is playing perfect, it’s going to be a difficult match already. And yeah, I just want to work on certain things and make them better and more consistent.”
Speaking of getting better and improvement there is one clear area where Raducanu needs to improve and that is the serve.
The Brit spoke about her serving performance today and how she plans to improve it going forwards, “I’m very clear on kind of what happened out there. The scoreline reflects one thing. If I’m not necessarily able to hold my service games or kind of dictate, I feel like it seeps into the rest of my game,” Raducanu explained afterwards.
“On my second serves, how the point is structured from then on, and also in the return games, you feel a lot more pressure. I think the thing I want to improve is serving. The first two matches I got away with it against two top players because I was able to defend and move, use the rest of my game. But I think that needs to improve.”
Now it’s back to the drawing board for Raducanu as she will look to recover from this heavy defeat and crack on with the rest of the season.
The former US Open champion admitted there are positives to come from this tournament and it won’t take too long before bouncing back from the manner of her loss, “I think the biggest positive I would say is how I’ve approached every single day,” Raducanu concluded her press conference by saying.
“I think one of my goals for this year is to just, yeah, be consistent, ride with it. I think today is going to be a really good test in a sense, but also I’m going to look back and be like I learnt a lot from it and got a lot of feedback of what I need to do better.Â
“I think, I don’t know, my team will probably tell me to, like, take it easy. I think for me, yeah, I feel like I just got a pretty good things to work on and feedback. I’ll probably just want to get into that as soon as possible. I feel like I’m speaking from a pretty rational place. I’m not necessarily too emotional either way. Me, I think I’ll just get back to it pretty quickly.”
Raducanu’s next tournament will be in Singapore on the week of the 27th of January.
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