A teenage opponent who takes the ball early, strikes it sweetly and knows how to stretch a lead: Emma Raducanu might as well have been playing herself in the quarter-finals of the Transylvania Open. Her opponent, Marta Kostyuk, is a mirror image of Raducanu, born the same year, precociously talented and capable of producing a similarly devastating brand of front-foot, first-strike tennis. The obvious distinction between the two is that while Raducanu has a grand slam title to her name, Kostyuk has greater experience of the WTA Tour. And it was experience that won the day in Cluj-Napoca as the US Open champion was swept aside 6-2, 6-1 in less than an hour.
Having matches under your belt counts for a lot at this level of the sport. Sometimes a contest can be won and lost before the players even reach the locker room. Equally, there are moments when the best way to stop an opponent is to not let them start. The trick is in recognising these things, in sensing weakness and exploiting it. And that comes with experience. Raducanu spoke beforehand of how Kostyuk used to “destroy” her in the juniors. The Ukrainian said afterwards she did not recall those results, but that she drew confidence from knowing Raducanu did, and used that to her advantage.
“When I read her comments after her match yesterday, it gave me some strength,” said the 19-year-old, ranked 55 in the world. “I don’t remember killing her and I saw that our record was 1-1. She remembered it and I thought: ‘I have to go with it.’ I think I did pretty well.”
Now that Raducanu knows how her opponent used her words, she will no doubt be more careful what she says next time. That is how experience works. She learns quickly, but even Raducanu can only take in so much, so fast. A lot has happened in a short space of time and, as she acknowledged afterwards, she needs room to process it all.
“It’s been a lot of learnings and I think I’ve experienced a lot in the last six months with not so many gaps, and I’m just adjusting to the fast-paced life of the tour and obviously still very new to it,” said Raducanu, the world No 23, whose first tour-level win came in the opening round when she beat Polona Hercog. “I think it’s still going to take me some time to adjust.”
The 18-year-old also spoke of feeling off the pace in her morning practice, of being below par physically, and that too can be sensed by an experienced competitor. Kostyuk felt the opening game of the match, in which Raducanu led 40-15 only to be broken after serving two double faults, was key to her win. Yet recognising the significance of such a moment is down to having gone through it plenty of times before, something the British No 1 has yet to do at this level.
“I was tired today, I knew from the morning, I knew from practice,” said Raducanu. “I wanted to try my best, and maybe it would go better. But I just couldn’t get it going today, unfortunately. Marta’s a great athlete, so I knew it was going to be a tough match. I wasn’t physically feeling 100%. I was quite tired and lethargic, but sometimes you just have those days when you don’t feel your best.”
Knowing how to handle such moments is vital, and Raducanu’s cause was not helped by a tally of 41 unforced errors. She struggled to find her range on the return, fashioning just one break point in the entire match, while on serve she found the court with an impressive 74% of her first deliveries only to be undermined by a combination of Kostyuk’s potency on the return and a tally of seven double faults.
Raducanu’s best phase of the contest came midway through the opening set, when she began to find her rhythm off the ground and went toe-to-toe with Kostuk in some ferocious baseline exchanges. But a chance to level at 3-3 was summarily snuffed out by a Kostyuk ace, and when the lunging Ukrainian later scraped back a short sliced forehand on set point, Raducanu did not react. It was an uncharacteristic lapse into inertia from Raducanu, and worse was to come. Raducanu won just one more game, although she went down swinging, going for broke behind her serve in the last game until one final, framed backhand put her out of her misery.
In defeat, Raducanu falls one match short of a first meeting with her childhood idol Simona Halep, just as she did in Indian Wells. Halep, the top seed, showed no sign of the back problem that hampered her in the previous round as she romped past wildcard Jaqueline Cristian 6-1, 6-1.
In the lower half of the draw, Anett Kontaveit brushed aside Anhelina Kalinina of Ukraine 6-1, 6-3, extending her indoor winning streak to 13 successive matches and moving within two wins of displacing eighth-placed Ons Jabeur in the race to the season-ending WTA Finals in Guadalajara. The Estonian second seed will face Rebecca Peterson in the semi-finals after the Swede beat qualifier Lesia Tsurenko 6-2, 3-6, 6-3.
Raducanu, meanwhile, will now turn her attention to the Linz Open, where she is scheduled to play in a week’s time. She said her sense of fatigue would not stop her from making the trip to Austria. “I want to give myself a chance to see if I can reset, bounce back and finish the year strong,” she said. “That’s the plan right now.”