Emma Raducanu should not have said yes to Andy Murray in first place
Even without taking to the court, Andy Murray has rolled back the years by generating one last drama at the All England Club.
Ultimately, though, it is Murray’s will-she, won’t-she doubles partner Emma Raducanu who really triggered this schemozzle.
Raducanu’s mistake was not to withdraw from their mixed-doubles match – because that was the only logical response to a possible finish time of 11pm, the night before a fourth-round singles match
No, Raducanu’s mistake was to accept Murray’s invitation in the first place. With the benefit of hindsight, this was naive.
There is perhaps no player in world tennis more wary of overextending themselves than Raducanu. To attempt to combine singles and doubles, when you monitor your own workload so carefully, was extremely ambitious.
Here is a woman who missed seven months of last season because of double wrist surgery, and who broke with tennis convention by taking a seven-week break from competition this spring. The intention, she said at the time, was “to give myself a chance to keep fit for the rest of the year”.
How, then, did Raducanu think that she could enter two different events at Wimbledon – the most high-stakes fortnight of her year – when the matches are bound to come thick and fast?
It is true that, in a perfect world, the All England Club could have alternated Raducanu’s commitments so that she played singles in the evenings and mixed on the afternoons of her off days.
But tennis tournaments rarely run smoothly, and a look out of the window during a showery first week should have rung warning bells.
Given a free hand, the Club would surely have given the British pairing a matinee slot on Saturday. But that became impossible when Friday’s rain prevented Marcelo Arevalo – one of their scheduled opponents – from completing his own second-round match in the men’s doubles.
As a result, Raducanu and Murray were given the graveyard slot: fourth on No 1 Court. There was no way of knowing how late the programme could have run.
We should note that players withdraw from doubles all the time when their singles campaigns take priority. In fact, the difference in prestige between singles and doubles is an ongoing point of debate within the sport. And the gravitas gap only widens when we get on to the essentially light-hearted business of mixed.
Yet this match clearly took on greater significance because it was meant to be Murray’s last tilt at a Wimbledon finale. Within the small world of British tennis, messing with the Murrays is no way to make yourself popular.
Raducanu did not look too stressed about the alleged “stiffness” in her right wrist when the BBC cameras caught her strolling towards the practice courts, just a few minutes after her withdrawal announcement.
The footage showed Raducanu grinning as she chirpily greeted players coming the other way, and then exchanged a few words with Jane O’Donoghue, the long-time mentor she recently said was “like a big sister to me”.
But there will inevitably be some sort of backlash to her decision, which is hardly what she needs at this pivotal moment in her career. It is not every day that you find yourself playing a qualifier for a place in the Wimbledon quarter-finals.
Raducanu credited the initial endorphin rush of Murray’s invitation for helping her through Wednesday’s second-round match against Elise Mertens. We can only hope that the souring of the mood does not affect her mindset against Lulu Sun – the world No 123 from New Zealand, who had never won a grand-slam match before last week.
Amid the initial excitement that followed Tuesday’s news, tennis fans started coming up with portmanteau names for the putative British duo. Proposals included Raducandy, Emm and M or even the Randies.
Perhaps more appropriate, given this grisly denouement, was the most cynical suggestion: A and E.
