MELBOURNE, Australia — “I think it had a mind of its own,” Emma Raducanu said of her boom-and-bust serve during Tuesday’s gritty win over No. 26 seed Ekaterina Alexandrova at the Australian Open.
Raducanu hit 15 double faults and nine aces in a 7-6(4), 7-6(2) victory. Her first serve was lethal at times, but Raducanu won just 30 percent of her second-serve points.
This was Raducanu’s first match of 2025 after a back spasm disrupted her pre-season. It was also the debut for what appeared to be a slightly tweaked service motion, with Raducanu seeming to use a more open grip to generate more sidespin, especially out wide on the deuce side. There were “teething problems,” to use Raducanu’s expression in her post-match news conference, and her coach, Nick Cavaday, looked like he was exhorting her to hit more kick serves on a couple of occasions.
Raducanu will now spend the next day or so working on the shot further, ahead of Thursday’s second-round match against her friend and fellow former teenage phenom Amanda Anisimova, the 23-year-old American.
Raducanu described the importance of keeping the unpredictability of her serve out of the rest of her game in her news conference.
“Maybe when you’re not committing as much on it, it kind of seeps through the first ball, after you’re a bit more under the pump,” she said.
“I’m looking forward to getting back out on the court tomorrow and working on it.”
Improving the serve has been a priority for Raducanu, 22, since she won the U.S. Open as a qualifier in 2021. In her first event back, Raducanu was visibly frustrated with her serving performance during a first-round, straight-sets defeat to Aliaksandra Sasnovich at Indian Wells, which was moved to October because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Raducanu won just 24 percent of her second serve points in that match.
Raducanu has hired coaches to work on specific shots ever since she was a junior, and Cavaday’s specialism is tweaking individual strokes. While it’s easy to apply mental observations to players struggling with their serve, players, coaches and experts in biomechanics will look first to grip and technique. World No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka cured her serving yips not with a mental coach, but with biomechanical changes to her service motion that amounted to destroying the old one and starting from scratch.
Raducanu and Cavaday worked hard on the serve last year, developing a more compact motion for the start of the grass-court season. The more abbreviated technique made for more cheap points as Raducanu reached the Wimbledon fourth round without serving brilliantly for her best showing at a Grand Slam since that shock U.S. Open win as an 18-year-old.
At the Billie Jean King Cup finals in November, Raducanu tweaked her serve again. “I think naturally my serve has gone through a few different variations,” she explained in a news conference. “On the grass, it was even shorter, and then I wasn’t really loving that, so I changed it back to a little bit longer.
“I need constant top-up and constant reminders. Otherwise, my technique just turns into a complete different serve and I lose my rhythm on it.”
The result was a better version of what we saw on Tuesday — deadly when it landed, but prone to misfiring.
“I hit a few double faults, but I think I take them with a grain of salt when I can serve my way out of the trouble, as well,” Raducanu said after her second match at the BJK event, a straight-sets win over Canada’s Rebecca Marino in which she won 100 percent of her first serve points in the opening set.
Against Alexandrova on Tuesday, Raducanu won a match littered with breaks of serve by finding solidity in her groundstrokes — returning efficiently to break serve in six of her 12 return games — and accepting that changing for the long term will result in short-term hiccups.
Emma Raducanu relied on groundstroke prowess to get past Ekaterina Alexandrova in Melbourne. (Shi Tang / Getty Images)
She said she told herself, “I’m at least going for it,” during the first set when she hit six aces and nine double faults, before rebounding from failing to serve out the match up 5-4 in the second set by breaking herself with a double fault.
“As the balls got heavier, it was a lot more difficult,” she said.
“I knew that even if I was down, I have great returns. It was good to be able to rely on other parts of my game today that I know are quite strong, as well.
“I’m just very proud that I didn’t let it affect me too much and let the match run away from me.”
Raducanu’s final two serves of the match were an ace followed by a double fault, in a neat summary of her all-or-nothing serving display. She will learn a lot from Tuesday’s match, and how she applies that knowledge against Anisimova may determine whether she can improve on her 0-3 record in second-round matches at the Australian Open.
(Top photo: Sydney Low / Cal Sport Media via Associated Press)
