“In the beginning I was just adjusting to the speed of the court,” Raducanu told on-court interviewer Monica Puig. “It was pretty quick and a lot more still than it had been for the week, because it had been very windy, so it was a different tempo.
“Marie is a really tough opponent,” she added. “I knew going in that I was going to have to play so many balls, and I think in the beginning I was missing a few of the finishing shots but I cleaned that up, so I’m very happy about that.”
The stats show how much Raducanu improved over the course of the match – and how powerless Bouzkova became. Raducanu’s tallies of clean winners were roughly equal (12 and 11) over the two sets, but her unforced-error count dropped from 13 to just three as she began to relax into the flow of her own game.
With Bouzkova increasingly struggling to win points, let alone games, this match was never going to extend to three sets – and a good thing too. Tending to fade in long contests, Raducanu wins only 40 per cent of deciders. (At the 2021 US Open, you may remember, she never had to play one.)
Unusual in its freedom, this was Raducanu’s first win over top-100 opposition since she overcame Beatriz Haddad Maia in Indian Wells last March. But it wasn’t the result that made an impression so much as the swagger. Raducanu played as if she believed completely in her ability, which has not always been the case over the past couple of seasons. The decision to reunite with Cavaday, who cheered her on from the sidelines, is looking well-judged.
The next round – which Raducanu will probably play on Wednesday – is an intriguing one. Her opponent is the second seed Ons Jabeur, whose Arab ancestry makes her the nearest thing the Middle-East has to a homegrown tennis star, even though she actually hails from Tunisia.
Jabeur received a first-round bye and thus has only scored one victory this season, which came against world No 150 Yuliia Starodubtseva at the Australian Open. In her second round in Melbourne, Jabeur was utterly bamboozled by 16-year-old Mirra Andreeva, and tallied only two games. In truth, she has been struggling for form ever since she laid an egg – to use John McEnroe’s vivid term for a disastrous underperformance – in last summer’s Wimbledon final.
“I really like Ons,” said Raducanu after the Bouzkova win. “She’s someone who has kind of taken me under her wing as I’ve been new to the tour. I’m really looking forward to it because a lot of people were saying to me ‘Ons, Ons, Ons,’ and I was like, ‘I’m playing Marie, who’s ranked like 30 in the world. So that’s not an easy match.’ But yeah, I’m really pleased to have put myself in this situation. And yeah, I’m going out with nothing to lose against her.”
