AUSTRALIAN OPEN: Raducanu handed tough first-round test against former US Open champion
In terms of status, this is one of the toughest unseeded opponents that the 19-year-old Briton could have faced
Winning the US Open last year guaranteed Emma Raducanu a seeding for the Australian Open, but she has not been rewarded with a kind draw. Sloane Stephens, also a grand-slam champion at Flushing Meadows, in 2017, awaits in the first round.
In terms of status, this is one of the toughest unseeded opponents that the 19-year-old Briton could have faced in her opening match. Stephens may have struggled for consistency in the past 18 months, dropping to No 68 in the world rankings, but she is still capable of producing a high level of play on her day.
Stephens, 28, also has much experience on the hard courts of Melbourne Park, while this will be the first time that her young opponent has played a professional match here.
As will be the case for most of the tournaments she plays in the first six months of the season, the No 17 seed Raducanu is turning up with barely any first-hand experience of the conditions. She did contest the Australian Open junior event three years ago but spent little time on site because of a first-round defeat.
There are inevitably high expectations of Raducanu this year given what she achieved in New York, becoming the first qualifier in tennis history to win a grand-slam tournament, but these should perhaps be tempered in the early stages of the season.
A bout of Covid-19 in Abu Dhabi last month disrupted her training block and she looked well short of match sharpness during a 6-0, 6-1 hammering by the big-hitting Elena Rybakina in her only warm-up match in Sydney this week.
Raducanu has reason to hope, however, that Stephens will also be a tad rusty on the court. The American decided to skip all the pre-Australian Open events after her New Year’s Day wedding to the former Sunderland footballer Jozy Altidore. If Raducanu can expose this and clear the first hurdle, then she can start thinking about a potential meeting with her idol Simona Halep in the third round.
Andy Murray, meanwhile, is showing some positive signs before his return to the Australian Open for the first time since he came close to retirement here in 2019.
The three-times grand-slam champion, 34, reached the semi-finals of the Sydney Classic after his opponent, David Goffin, withdrew because of a knee injury at 6-2 down.
It is the first time that Murray has won three consecutive matches at a tournament since he became the European Open champion in Antwerp in October 2019. He is due to face Reilly Opelka, from the United States, in the early hours of Friday morning.
A rematch of his second-round battle against Georgia’s Nikoloz Basilashvili in Sydney awaits Murray at Melbourne Park. Murray narrowly prevailed in three sets on Wednesday and would have preferred an easier opponent than the powerful No 21 seed first up here.
Dan Evans has also made a promising start to the season, winning all five matches he has played in 2022. A 6-4, 7-6 (7-5) win against America’s Maxime Cressy set up a semi-final in Sydney against Russia’s Aslan Karatsev, and he will be considered the favourite against Goffin in the first round in Melbourne next week.
Cameron Norrie, the British No 1, opens against the talented 21-year-old American Sebastian Korda, who has spent much of the past week hitting balls in his hotel bedroom after testing positive for Covid-19 in Adelaide. Heather Watson faces Egypt’s Mayar Sherif.
