When Emma Raducanu walked out on to Centre Court for the first time on Monday, the difficulties of the past six months slowly seemed to melt away.
Handed a tricky assignment in the form of Alison van Uytvanck, the gifted Belgian who won two of the four warm-up events she played before Wimbledon, Raducanu rose to the occasion with a poise and determination that stirred memories of her spellbinding progress to the fourth round last summer.
Her play did not exude quite the same smooth assurance, but that barely mattered. After injuring an abdominal muscle in Nottingham three weeks ago, casting her participation at Wimbledon in doubt, she had not only made the starting line, but won. It was as though the magic of the old place had somehow rubbed off on her.
As it turned out, however, magic is no substitute for experience. Scheduled on Centre court for the second match in a row, Raducanu endured an altogether more chastening time against Caroline Garcia, whose grass-court guile and unwavering commitment to attack ensured the 19-year-old was never truly in contention for a place in the third round.
Raducanu was comprehensively overpowered by the Frenchwoman, an in-form opponent who won on grass in Bad Homburg last week and had learned the lessons from a second-round loss to the British 10th seed three months ago in Indian Wells.
Therein lies the difficulty for Raducanu, who was an unknown quantity last year but is now a prized scalp whose game will be pored over and picked apart by her more seasoned peers. The solution, she said after her 6-3, 6-3 defeat, was to continue building her game and use the tactics employed by her rivals as a source of information to identify and address any weak areas.
“I’ll just get better, I’ll just look at what’s not working, what my weaknesses are, improve them,” said Raducanu. “It’s good for me. These lessons are coming every single week. It’s just a reminder, like, ‘You’ve got to do this, this and that’, and it comes from different players.
“They’re just highlighting all my weaknesses. When you do it on a big court like that, it’s definitely magnified. It’s just great for me to get all these lessons at such a young age, so that when I’m in my mid-20s, I’ll have those issues or little glitches in my game sorted.”
The lessons came and thick fast against Garcia. Ranked 55th but once as high as fourth in the world, the Frenchwoman thumped winners off both wings in the opening game before breaking in the second with a searing backhand return. She immediately relinquished the advantage with an error-strewn service game, but her intentions were clear. She was not about to play the role of Raducanu’s stooge.
“Obviously I learned a little bit some stuff when I played against her in the US, and tried to learn from my loss and makes things better,” said Garcia, who won her second French Open doubles title earlier this month alongside Kristina Mladenovic. “It was a different surface today, so it’s very different.”
With the weight, depth and trajectory of Garcia’s returns causing Raducanu all manner of problems, another break soon followed. As Garcia forged ahead, the disparity between the two women became increasingly visible in their court positioning. Garcia moved inside the baseline to crush her groundstrokes and returns; Raducanu was pushed back behind it. Garcia charged forward at every opportunity, prowling the net with aggression and athleticism; Raducanu declined to hit volleys or overheads in the warm-up, instead trying to establish a better rhythm from the back in the swirling wind, as she later explained.
“It was first-strike tennis,” said Raducanu. “She served really well today. I didn’t really have any looks, I felt, or many second serves. And even when I did, they were tricky ones, with the wind holding them up.
“I think that serving-wise, my ball speed was just lower in general. I don’t know. Maybe it was the conditions, but I just didn’t have enough ball speed today.”
As Raducanu emphasised, however, the main problem lay in her abbreviated build-up following the side strain that limited her competitive play on grass to just seven games in Nottingham, and her practice time to just “seven hours in a month”. Understandably, after a season in which she has so often been let down by her body, she gave short shrift to the suggestion that pressure created by her US Open victory had played a part in her downfall.
“There’s no pressure,” said Raducanu. “Why is there any pressure? I’m still 19. Like, it’s a joke. I literally won a slam.”
Raducanu will now take some time off before turning her attention to the defence of her US Open title. The hope must be that she can enjoy an injury-free period that will allow her to tackle the final slam of the season with more than seven hours of tennis under her belt.