If it takes a village to raise a child, then the modern tennis tour increasingly requires a significant entourage.
World-beating names like Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz tend to have both a primary and a secondary coach – because few of the top operators want to spend all year away from home – with extra physios and fitness trainers thrown in.
In the case of Emma Raducanu, however, hiring staff has always been a tricky proposition. Tennis insiders have long felt that she needed a full-time fitness trainer with her on the road. And now that she has finally employed one – the highly regarded Yutaka Nakamura – she suddenly finds herself without a coach again.
In an era when coaching from the stands is permitted on the WTA Tour, this puts Raducanu at a significant disadvantage, and indeed she has lost both her first-round matches since Nick Cavaday stepped down. For context, Cavaday has a chronic health condition which is incompatible with her determination to play a full calendar of events this season.
Raducanu was accompanied in Abu Dhabi – where she suffered a straight-sets defeat to former Wimbledon champion Marketa Vondrousova on Tuesday – by Nakamura and Roman Kelecic, a locally based coach who took her to junior events when she was in her mid-teens.
This is very much her way: she has increasingly looked to work with people she knew before she became famous, including Cavaday, who ran Bromley Tennis Centre when she was first progressing through the red-orange-green system of introductory tennis balls.
But if she really wants to get her career kick-started, Raducanu should think big. She should take her cue from players like Aryna Sabalenka, the world No1, who has not only a coach (Anton Dubrov) and a fitness trainer (Jason Stacy) in her corner but a biomechanist (Gavin MacMillan) as well.
McMillan helped Sabalenka rebuild her serve after a bout of yips – a feat many observers doubted was possible – and Raducanu could clearly do with some reconstruction of her own action after suffering no fewer than 30 breaks of serve in five matches to date this season.
Yet it is in the big picture – the strategy – that there is most room for improvement. Raducanu has performed something of a U-turn in her approach to 2025, deciding that she needs to pause last year’s programme of detailed technical work at the National Tennis Centre and get out on the road instead.
Which is fine, as long as her body holds up. But against Vondrousova on Tuesday, Raducanu was already showing signs of her infamous physical frailty, grabbing her neck at crucial moments in a way that seemed to change the direction of the match.
There is one person in Britain who is better qualified than anybody when it comes to plotting a long-term campaign – and he just finished a stint with the undisputed tennis GOAT, Novak Djokovic, in Melbourne.
Nobody is expecting Andy Murray to spend 40 weeks a year on the road, as he did in his playing heyday. But he could function as a sounding board and a point of reassurance, while helping to build the right team for day-to-day management.
Such a move would demonstrate that Raducanu’s controversial withdrawal from last summer’s Wimbledon mixed-doubles event has been definitively smoothed over, and that the two biggest figures in British tennis are back on the same page.
It might also unlock the vast potential which, at the moment, Raducanu is struggling to convert into wins.
The experience of watching Raducanu play is at once fascinating, entertaining and frustrating, because she remains a liquid mover with a clean, elegant ball-strike. No less an expert than Rick Macci, the developmental coach who taught Serena Williams among many others, said again this week that “top 10 is on the horizon… she has the talent”.
Perhaps it just needs the right voice – a deep Scottish monotone – to help her get there.
