Emma Raducanu ‘keeping guard up more’ after claiming people see her as a ‘piggy bank’
Emma Raducanu says she will be “keeping my guard up a little bit more” as she resumes her grand slam career with the smallest of entourages: just her childhood coach Nick Cavaday and mother Renee.
Where other players have brought fitness trainers, physiotherapists, sports psychologists and nutritionists to Melbourne, Raducanu has kept it simple.
“I’m pretty introverted,” she explained. “I like just being with myself or people who I’m very close to and I know really well already.
“I think the bigger you extend your circle, you just never know. I just like to keep what happens very close.”
This mindset explains her choice of Cavaday as her coach for the Australian Open, and Jane O’Donoghue for the same role in Auckland a fortnight ago.
Here are two people who knew Raducanu before she was famous. During her junior development phase, Cavaday was head coach at her local centre in Bromley, while O’Donoghue – who has since exchanged tennis for banking – was national coach and under-18s captain at the Lawn Tennis Association.
Raducanu’s comments in Melbourne come after a big interview last summer in which she complained “people in the industry... see me as a piggy bank.” Such an attitude could be characterised as pessimistic – paranoid even – except that Victoria Azarenka, the former world No 1, expressed the same view on a podcast a couple of weeks later.
“When Emma won the US Open, what I noticed was that everybody latched on to her as if she was their friend,” Azarenka told host Simon Jordan. “I was thinking that they probably didn’t even know her a month ago.
“I think the advice I would have given her is that you should not forget the people who drove you to that moment and who helped you get there. From my experience, I would say she needs to have a very small circle and a very solid one.”
Whether Raducanu listened to the podcast or not, she has certainly followed Azarenka’s advice. And she passed the favour on this week when she was asked about Luke Littler, darts sensation and fellow teenage prodigy.
Raducanu replied: “I would just say [to Littler], ‘Keep your circle close, take time to actually enjoy it, and don’t rush into the next thing straightaway’.”
As almost every tennis fan knows, Raducanu has gone through five different coaching appointments in less than three years. She seems to have little respect for the breed in general, telling the BBC in October: “On certain occasions they haven’t been able to keep up with the questions I’ve asked and maybe that’s why it ended.”
Her agent, Max Eisenbud, told the Tennis Podcast that “it’s probably gonna be like that [short coaching tenures] for the rest of her career”. But Raducanu seems to feel a real connection with Cavaday. On Friday, she said that she hoped “to continue with him [Cavaday] because I feel very comfortable with him”.
There has certainly been a positive vibe about practice sessions in Melbourne, with Cavaday offering non-stop advice and Raducanu listening intently to his words. We are still at the “phoney war” stage of the trip, however, and his real value will be easier to judge after Tuesday’s first-round meeting with Shelby Rogers, of the United States.
Speaking to the BBC on Friday, Raducanu said that Cavaday’s presence brought back innocent memories of a time before she was a celebrity. “I was 10 and 11 when I first started with him, and he’s from the same area that I am in Bromley,” she said. “Sometimes when you’re on the court, I guess you lose the feelings of when you first started playing, as an under-12 doing those 7am sessions. It’s pretty nice to have that nostalgia back.
“One thing that I kind of forgot about the tour is how everyone walks around with like five different people around them.
“I think at one point I had a similar scenario. That has very much become the stereotype or the norm in the tennis tour. But yet it’s a completely different kind of thing to what we would have had growing up and competing at these [junior] tournaments.
“So I’ve just really liked keeping it close, keeping a small circle, not having to manage five other people around you. That has become the norm, but, like, I never really did things the normal way.”
