Baffling. That was the word used by one tennis insider to describe the latest instalment of Emma Raducanu’s ongoing injury nightmare.
Clearly, any serious injury is both unfortunate and worthy of enormous sympathy. At the same time, though, there must be questions over the way her schedule has been managed over the past six weeks.
How did Raducanu go from an apparently minor injury, picked up during what she called the “back end of the clay-court season”, to a stress fracture in the right shin or ankle that ruled her out of Wimbledon?
We will probably never know the details, given the Royal family-style information blackout operated by her agents IMG. But even from our position as outside observers, it never made any sense for Raducanu to rush back after a 72-day absence from the match court – as a result of the after-effects of a respiratory virus – to play two events at the fag-end of the clay-court swing.
This is not just hindsight speaking. Telegraph Sport raised this very issue after Raducanu’s disastrous first-round exit from the French Open at the hands of Solana Sierra – a 6-0, 7-6 loss in which she committed 42 unforced errors and later admitted that “it could have been nice to have saved yourself the match like today”.