EMMA RADUCANU'S FRENCH OPEN DECISION DEFENDED BY LAURA ROBSON AS WIMBLEDON HOPES SHARED

Former British tennis star Laura Robson believes that Emma Raducanu skipping the French Open to focus on Wimbledon will have been an 'easy decision'. Raducanu's lowly WTA world ranking means she would have had to come through qualifying at Roland Garros, where she has never been beyond the second round.

Raducanu has slipped outside the world's top 200 players, with her time out on court limited over the past 12 months due to having surgery on her wrists and ankle last year.

A taxing route into the French Open main draw weeks before Wimbledon was seemingly enough to sway Raducanu away from trying her luck in Paris, with the season's only clay-court Grand Slam getting underway this weekend.

Instead, Raducanu will pour all her efforts into maximising the grass-court season, beginning with an appearance at the Nottingham Open in June. Robson, who made it to the fourth round of Wimbledon in 2013, believes that her compatriot made a shrewd decision.

"You've got a really big run of tournaments coming up if you're playing on grass, and you want to make sure your body is as ready as possible," she told Tennis365. "She knows that's the surface she can do really well on.

"You want to make sure you're 100 per cent ready to go. Knowing that she wasn't going to get a main draw wildcard [at the French Open] means it was an easy decision to reset and go straight to the grass."

While Raducanu has shown flashes of the quality that won her the US Open in 2021, performances have been wildly inconsistent since her unlikely triumph at Flushing Meadows. Robson hopes she can improve on that aspect of her game at SW19 this summer.

"It's about getting some consistency which has been the story of this year," she continued. "When she plays and she's fit, she does really well. We saw that at the Billie Jean King Cup. We saw that in Stuttgart and a couple of other matches this year.

"It's just about being able to produce that level day after day, even when you're tired and things aren't feeling great. That's the difference between people in the top 100 and people in the top 20 - they're so much more used to going out there and not feeling 100 per cent."

In Nottingham next month, 21-year-old Raducanu will line up alongside Ons Jabeur, Barbora Krejcikova and Sofia Kenin in the main draw, which gets going less than a month before Wimbledon itself.

2024-05-25T11:52:07Z dg43tfdfdgfd