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Tennis | Emma Raducanu in the semifinals of the US Open 2021 | Outside of Soccer

In the UK, the talent of Laura Robson, the last British tennis player under the age of 20 to reach the round of 16 in New York, is still yearned for. An Olympic Games medalist and spiritual successor to Virginia Wade, Robson, now 27, could never live up to the expectations of a country that, in the face of Andy Murray’s ever closer march, is thirsty for heroines and that is why now her gaze falls on the star Emma Raducanu.

The 18-year-old has become the youngest tennis player to reach the US Open semifinals since Maria Sharapova in 2005, and the first rookie to do so since Venus Williams in 1997. She has yet to lose a set in the entire tournament, counting the previous phase, which she had to play as it was the 150th in the world, and she is the player who needed the fewest games to reach the quarterfinals since Serena Williams in 2013. Her numbers make everyone in the world rise from their seats. tennis, accustomed, especially on the women’s circuit, to shooting stars, those who appear in a tournament never to settle. This is how Raducanu rose to fame, with a round of 16 of Wimbledon that took this girl, located in position 338 of the ranking at that time, from ostracism

. After training at the All England Club this year, he was barely accompanied by two bodyguards and no one tried to stop him to get an autograph. That image is no longer going to be repeated, because for the United Kingdom it is already a star. His semifinals in New York place him as the best British racket, above Johanna Konta, another tennis player who always aimed more than he was and who, like Robson, injuries have tortured. “With each game I am improving,” says a player who did not compete between January 2020 and June this year due to the impact of the pandemic and to prepare for her university entrance exams.

Specializing in mathematics and economics, she took them forward with ten, such as her participation in Wimbledon, curtailed by respiratory problems that did nothing but make her the most beloved of the English public. Surprisingly, Raducanu, after the greatest success of his career, then did without Nigel Sears, his coach and father of Kim Sears (Andy Murray’s wife), to start working with Andrew Richardson, a former British player with whom he already agreed. at the Bromley Tennis Center, which was his school in London until two years ago.

The results, far from getting worse, have improved under the tutelage of Richardson and this girl, with a Chinese mother and a Romanian father and born in Canada, is already the star that the United Kingdom longed for and lost when Robson began to feel discomfort in her wrist in 2013. “Emma is a very dedicated person. Once she wins a match, she is already thinking about the next one. I think we can be very optimistic about what is coming,” said Ian Bates, head of women’s tennis at the English Federation. , to Sky.

In one of the best US Open in recent years, Raducanu is one of three teenagers to have shone with her own light. Together with the Spanish Carlos Alcaraz, eliminated in the quarterfinals, and the Canadian Leylah Fernandez, semifinalist, they make up the nucleus of young people who have hatched in New York and in whom everyone looks at, in the first tournament in decades that has no longer counted with three legends like Serena, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. And while the circuit already calls them the “NextNextGen”, the United Kingdom rubs its hands with its new pearl, the successor of Murray and Virginia Wade, the last British to win a Grand Slam, in the distant 1977. Now the hope is for her. of the country fall on the young Raducanu.

EFE

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