Kim Clijsters has questioned the decision-making process in Emma Raducanu’s camp following the recent departure of her latest coach.
Shortly after her second round exit from the Australian Open, Raducanu confirmed she has parted ways with Francis Roig. Roig, who previously coached Rafael Nadal, had worked with the Brit since last summer. He is the eighth coach to come and go for the 23-year-old over the past five years.
Raducanu has also previously worked with Mark Petchey, Vlado Platenik, Nick Cavaday, Seb Sachs, Dimitry Tursunov, Torben Beltz, Andrew Richardson and Nigel Seals. Currently, she is seeking help from Alexis Canter during her latest tournament in Romania this week, where she is the top seed.
The coaching carousel has raised the eyebrows of many, including four-time Grand Slam champion Clijsters.
“To me, I’m curious when I hear those kind of headlines, who is making those decisions?” Clijsters recently said on the Love All Podcast.
“Is she (Raducanu) doing it? Is it an agent? Is it a parent?
“There’s a lot of things that I’m curious about in that situation. Who is making these decisions for her? Who pushes the panic button so quickly?
“Because she’s had some really good coaches that she’s worked with in the past, and coaches that are like what I’ve mentioned earlier, who want to take their time, who know that it takes time to build and make changes to a technique and to a tactical gameplan. Like, it takes time to work on that.”
Since winning the 2021 US Open, Raducanu hasn’t featured in another final on the WTA Tour. However, during some of this period, she was sidelined from action for weeks due to injury issues. Raducanu entered this week’s Romanian Open having won back-to-back matches in eight out of her last 24 tournaments played.
“To me, it’s almost like she’s like a soccer club, that’s like a soccer approach when they have a couple of bad games, like at the start of the season, just hired a new coach and then a few games in, they lose and then onto the next one,” Clijsters continued.
“I think it might be good that she learns to push through and find somebody that she really has a good connection with and then work hard on, I think, building a longer coaching relationship and having the longer approach in her mindset, or whoever is making that decision.”
During her career, Clijsters worked mainly with Belgian coaches. Among those were Fissette (2009-2011), Carl Maes (1996-2002 and 2011-2012) and Marc Dehous (2002-2005).
“I think it takes time for a coach to be able to do their job, right? And that’s that kind of, finding that balance between giving it time to trust your coach, giving it time for the effects that a coach can have.” She commented.
“Because a big red flag is when you have a coach that comes in and starts changing everything, that is just trying to put his footprint on a player and hoping that will give him recognition. I think those are big red flags.
“So I like that there’s coaches who kind of take their time and want to get to know their player, get to know how they think. Darren Cahill is very much like that.”
Raducanu will play her quarter-final match at the Romanian Open on Wednesday. She has already produced straight-set wins over Greet Minnen and Kaja Juvan. Against Juvan, she was down 0-5 in the first set.
