Emma Raducanu’s turbulent year has continued after the former US Open champion split with her Russian coach Dmitry Tursunov and signed up the fitness coach who transformed Andy Murray.
Tursunov has left Raducanu’s camp in order to take a role with a rival player after just two-and-a-half months together. As a result, she will be looking for another coach ahead of next season’s campaign, which she will probably begin with a world ranking in the 60s.
Tursunov’s departure makes him her fourth official coach to leave – or be sacked – in the last 15 months, after Nigel Sears, Andrew Richardson and Torben Beltz.
But while Tursunov moves on, the experienced fitness trainer Jez Green has signed up, with a view to cutting down on the constant niggling injuries which have blighted Raducanu’s year.
Green boasts one of the strongest CVs of any fitness trainer on the tour. Most significantly, he worked with Murray from an early stage, helping to transform a gangling teenager into the block of solid muscle we see today.
Admittedly, there was a bit of edge to their split in 2014, with Murray complaining that too much of their endurance training had been based around running. But Green has since worked with another pair of elite players in Alexander Zverev and Dominic Thiem, and his overall mastery of the business is unquestioned.
Raducanu is certainly in need of an effective training programme, after a year in which she has retired in the middle of four different matches, while also picking up a variety of minor niggles including blisters and lost toenails.
She had previously been working with her fitness trainer from her junior days, Gareth Shelbourne, who is based in Beckenham and will continue to provide some assistance.
But Green is different in that he is likely to provide a more holistic service, working out a programme for Raducanu’s off-season training block and then – if all goes well – potentially travelling to some events with her next season.
Word from Raducanu’s camp suggests that she was enjoying working with Tursunov, who oversaw eight wins and seven losses in the couple of months he spent with her. However, he is understood to have been attracted by a rival offer, and will likely be back on the tour soon.
There was also the side issue that Tursunov – who has a Russian passport even though he lives in the USA – was finding it difficult to get visas. If Raducanu wanted to fit in a training block with him, she needed to travel all the way to California.
Raducanu called time on her WTA season last week, blaming a wrist problem. But she is still hoping to play in the Billie Jean King Cup finals in Glasgow in the second week of November.
Yes this is more upheaval for Raducanu – but this is why it is a brilliant move
After the year that Raducanu has had, it might seem difficult to work up much enthusiasm about yet another change in her support staff.
And yet, the news that Raducanu has signed the experienced fitness trainer Green is actually the most encouraging bulletin to arrive from her management team all season.
The first thing to say about Green is that he has all the credentials, having worked with three top-five men in Murray, Zverev and Thiem. But even if we put Green’s record to one side for a moment, his arrival tells us something important about Raducanu’s mindset.
The very fact that Raducanu engaged him in the first place shows us that she is beginning to learn from her mistakes. And, even better, that she is motivated to put in the work. Green is not the sort of character who will sit back and let her coast during the coming off-season.
In hindsight, this appointment – or one like it – should have happened a year ago. An ever-present fitness expert might have saved her from the frustrating litany of injuries that began with an apparently innocuous blister in Melbourne before developing through hip trouble in Guadalajara, a bad back in Rome and an abdominal strain in Nottingham.
Even now, Raducanu might be on the court in Cluj-Napoca – the Transylvanian city where she connected with her Romanian roots last year – if she had been better advised throughout the season. As it is, she has called time on her WTA campaign, citing a wrist injury, and remains in doubt for next month’s Billie Jean King Cup finals.
A year ago, as we watched Raducanu’s US Open miracle unfold, it seemed as if she had arrived on the professional stage fully formed: the finished article at just 18. But this was something of an illusion.
Remember that she dashed through every one of her 10 matches in New York in straight sets, thereby saving herself significant effort. And that the US Open’s featherweight balls favour short, sharp points.
In the heavier conditions that prevail at most other tournaments, tennis becomes an endurance-based sport. So when it came to her first full season, Raducanu – who was doing her A-levels only 16 months ago – turned out to lack physical resilience.
Green could hardly be better placed to address this issue. Because the job of transforming Raducanu from a fragile reed into a solid, bankable athlete is akin to the one he has already performed with Murray.
The two men began collaborating in 2007, two summers after Murray had cramped up against David Nalbandian at Wimbledon. By 2008, Murray had improved his power and conditioning to such an extent that he was able to beat Richard Gasquet from two sets down on Centre Court, while showing off his bulging bicep to the courtside photographers.
As Murray understood from day one, the first challenge is to get on the court. Only then can you start to chase titles – or even to work consistently on your game. Which is why the Green appointment feels like a much bigger deal than the departure of Tursunov.
Telegraph Sport understands that Tursunov was the one who wanted to move on, having been offered an alternative deal with another player. This, in itself, is a reminder of how far Raducanu’s stock has fallen in the last 12 months.
But then technical tweaks are less important right now than setting up a sustainable training programme, and pacing the off-court work so that it dovetails with Raducanu’s match commitments.
At various times this season, we have heard that she has been fitting in extra training around her tournaments. The motivation was understandable, as Raducanu was hoping to catch up on work she was unable to do last winter, because of an ill-timed bout of Covid. But the combination of serious gym time and matchplay is generally not recommended.
Throughout 2022, the impression has been of a chaotic, unstructured approach in all areas of Raducanu’s game. There was even a switch from polyester to gut strings during the clay-court swing, which baffled those with a close understanding of racket technology.
Another common theme throughout this disappointing season – which saw Raducanu win only 16 matches of her 34 matches on the WTA Tour – has been an apparent reluctance to invest in serious coaching talent. The “new training model” that she adopted shortly before Wimbledon, in which she effectively ran her own programme with occasional help from the Lawn Tennis Association, was always destined to come to grief.
By bringing in Green, Raducanu is finally signalling that she understands the value of proven talent. If she can now replace Tursunov with a technical coach who inspires similar levels of respect, then stocks in Raducanu PLC might begin to gain value once again.