The impossible really is nothing for Emma Raducanu, the new British No 1, who eased into the US Open semi-finals without the slightest fuss. The whole thing feels like a feverish delusion. And yet, every time you wonder if it’s really happening, Raducanu’s smiling face pops on another news bulletin.
Previously, a sceptic could have made a cogent argument that the whole thing was a massive fluke. Until Wednesday, Raducanu had come through seven major wins – three at Wimbledon and four in New York – without playing a top 40-opponent.
But that theory was comprehensively exploded by this 6-3, 6-4 win over Belinda Bencic, the 11th seed. Bencic arrived on Arthur Ashe Stadium in a rich vein of form, having won the Olympic singles title less than six weeks ago. She left the court haggard and confused, the latest victim of Raducanu’s mental-disintegration techniques.
For most players, tennis is a game of hopscotch. You have to work your way along the board, sneaking up on your targets by instalments. Whereas Raducanu has just taken a running jump and skipped the whole process. She is delivering miracles on a 48-hour cycle.
How is this untried 18-year-old suddenly competing with tennis royalty? It’s supposed to be harder than ever to carve through a grand-slam draw, thanks to sports science, data analysis and all the rest of it. But that hasn’t stopped Raducanu gatecrashing the semi-finals without dropping a set or even facing so much as a tie-break.
To explain this mystery would require the wits of Hercule Poirot crossed with the technical analysis of Dan Maskell. And yet, two themes keep recurring.
The first is winning streaks – both within tournaments and within matches. On Wednesday night, Bencic managed to stop the rot at five straight games – a major improvement on the 11-game sequences that Raducanu had strung together in both her previous wins. But that was still enough to carry Raducanu from 1-3 down to one set up. Such turnarounds carry a deep psychological impact. Bencic never recovered.
Raducanu’s long phases of dominance stem from her greatest strength, the return of serve. Top players expect to be on the front foot after the serve, feasting on slow returns and racking up easy holds. That is the way they regroup when things turn sticky. But Radacanu’s returns fly at your ankles like an angry skateboard. Taking her lead from Novak Djokovic, she loves to knock people back off the baseline with a deep and central first ball.
The second common theme between her wins has been the way her opponents’ games keep collapsing. Shelby Rogers, her quarter-final victim, admitted to being embarrassed by the way she played. And while Bencic took a 3-1 early lead, her patterns soon broke down under the stress of Raducanu’s constant pressure. “I’m definitely very disappointed that I couldn’t show what I really could have played,” said Bencic, repeating almost verbatim what Raducanu’s opponents have been saying all fortnight.
It is clearly disconcerting to play someone who takes the ball so early, who shows no fear, and who targets your weaknesses with such ruthlessness. Raducanu did come under a little pressure in her final two service games of the match, finding herself 0-30 down on both occasions. But she wasn’t fazed. She simply homed in on Bencic’s increasingly wonky forehand, which promptly spiralled further out of control.
Her self-possession is uncanny. When you play a teenager, you might expect to look down the other end at moments of stress and see your opponent chewing her fingernails or grinding her teeth. And yet Raducanu probably looked more nervous walking into her A-Level examinations at Newstead School than she did in New York.
As Raducanu told reporters afterwards “I was saying to myself, ‘This could be the last time you play on Ashe, so you might as well just go for it and enjoy everything. I’d say I’m pretty relaxed. I trust myself and it’s all mental at the end of the day.
“I don’t really stress out over many things,” she added. “One day there was bad traffic getting in [to the Billie Jean King Tennis Centre] because of a hurricane the night before. I was saying to my coaches, ‘It’s okay if we miss practice,’ and they were like, ‘What do you mean it’s okay?’”
As Britain’s greatest player Virginia Wade put it on Tuesday, Raducanu’s game “ticks all the boxes”. On Wednesday it was the forehand that really shone, repeatedly flying up the line for a clean winner.
Raducanu’s forehand hadn’t stood out at Wimbledon, but over the last six weeks of her American odyssey, it has developed into an armour-piercing weapon. Imagine how exciting that must be. So sudden was the transformation that she might as well have been bitten by a radioactive spider.
After Wednesday’s result, Raducanu’s ranking already stands on the fringes of the world’s top 50. She has slipped past Johanna Konta and Heather Watson as smoothly and effortlessly as she has dismantled her last five opponents (make that eight, counting the qualifying draw) on the courts of Flushing Meadows.
And what of her mum and dad? How did they react to this latest win? Raducanu grinned. “I haven’t actually called my parents for quite a while,” she admitted. She could have been a cheeky teenager on her year out. Except that, instead of touring Machu Picchu or the Taj Mahal, she is beating the world’s best tennis players with unfathomable insouciance.