Welcome back to the Monday Tennis Briefing, where The Athletic will explain the stories behind the stories from the past week on court.
This week, Emma Raducanu made her plans for 2025, the off-season, well, happened and the Australian Open dealt out some not-so-wild wildcards.
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How will Emma Raducanu handle her rise back up the rankings?
Raducanu started 2024 ranked world No. 301 after an injury-ravaged 2023. Thanks to her ‘special’ ranking — the WTA term for a protected ranking — and the occasional wildcards that come the way of a Grand Slam champion, she could compete at most of the events she wanted to while taking breaks when necessary. Her ranking now stands at No. 57.
“One thing with the WTA is we’re pretty much made to play the events when we’re in a certain ranking. Where my ranking was and is at, I didn’t have to play every single event,” she told reporters at London’s National Tennis Centre this month.
Raducanu added that “having to play every single tournament” is a major burden not just physically, but also in producing a balanced schedule. “Having a mulligan to not play a tournament would be a really good addition,” she said.
One of the big discussion points this year has been the demands placed on players by the WTA’s increased number of mandatory events, which includes all Grand Slams, all WTA 1000 events and six 500-level tournaments for those ranked high enough for automatic entry (designed to bolster those events just below the majors and to give the 250-level events just below them more of a regional focus). The world No. 2, Iga Swiatek, lost the top spot to Aryna Sabalenka in October after not playing enough 500-level events.
“It’s not going to end well, and it makes tennis less fun for us, let’s just say,” Swiatek said in a news conference at the Cincinnati Open in August. “I don’t think it should be like that because we deserve to rest a little more.”
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Raducanu, who missed the Asian hard-court swing with a foot injury in September after organizing her season around that block of tournaments, said that the time away helped outside of physical recovery. She went to see her grandmother in China, which “was a bit of a turning point”.
“I was playing the piano, painting. Exploring my artistic side a bit. It just got me thinking. That final foot injury just had me saying, ‘I want to stay healthy next year’.
“That was probably a big moment where I wanted to spend more time and energy on my fitness.”
Raducanu, who subsequently brought on fitness coach Yutaka Nakamura for the 2025 season, wants to plan her events “holistically” after feeling her scheduling was too short-sighted. She wants to ask herself, “What is the best for me this year? What is the main objective? How are we going to build the schedule around the main objective for this year?”
Whatever she decides, Raducanu says that in 2025: “Everything I want to do is match a philosophy. I don’t want to be doing things that are bitty. Every decision I make, I want it to link to a deeper reason. Not just, ‘OK, it’s spontaneous, I’m going to do this’. Everything has to link together.”
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Once again, how wild is a wildcard?
With prize money for just making the first round of a Grand Slam approaching $100,000 (£80,000), the countries that host them may want to consider adjusting their process of handing out wildcard entries.
It’s always been reasonably unfair to young players from countries other than Australia, France, Great Britain and the United States that they basically have no shot at receiving the free pass that host countries hand out to their own. With the windfall it now brings, it seems increasingly out of whack.
Tennis Australia released its wildcards for next month’s Australian Open on Friday.
Stan Wawrinka got one. He’s 39, a three-time Grand Slam champion who won the tournament in 2014. He also got whipped in the first round of the U.S. Open by Italy’s Mattia Bellucci. He’s ranked world No. 161 right now.
Stan Wawrinka beat Rafael Nadal in the 2014 men’s singles final. (Matt King / Getty Images)
Other than the entries they swap with other Grand Slam hosts and the champion of an Asia-Pacific playoff, the Aussies kept the rest for themselves. The other men:
- Tristan Schoolkate, 23, 1-3 in 2024 on the ATP Tour, ranked 168.
- Li Tu, 28, 0-4 on the ATP Tour in 2024, ranked 174. He did take a set off Carlos Alcaraz at the U.S. Open.
- James McCabe, 0-4 on the ATP Tour in 2024, ranked 256.
On the women’s side, Daria Saville, No. 108, and Ajla Tomljanovic, No. 109, are defensible. They’ve battled injuries in recent years, have been inside the top 50 and are right on the cusp of a main draw spot. They may very well get in on ranking once withdrawals begin.
Maya Joint, 18, isn’t far behind at No. 116, but she’s just 1-2 at the tour level. Emerson Jones is 16 and ranked No. 375. Talia Gibson is 20 and ranked No. 140 but is yet to win a tour-level match.
Grand Slams rightly market themselves as the pinnacle of tennis. That may be true, but they’re not nearly as tough as they could be with fewer home-country free passes into their main draws.
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And how long is a piece of string (or a tennis off-season)?
Do you want to know why players complain so often about the off-season? Because there isn’t one. Not really.
Ben Shelton took four days off.
Carlos Alcaraz didn’t touch his rackets for 10 days, which might sound like a lot.
Players competing in the United Cup have to be in Australia on Christmas Eve, a mere eight days away. It takes two days just to get there from much of the world. A handful of top players, including Taylor Fritz, are heading to Abu Dhabi for the World Tennis League exhibition that runs December 19-22. Many of them use it as part of their pre-season prep.
Fritz played his last 2024 match at the Davis Cup on November 20. Between then and landing in Abu Dhabi, he will have squeezed in a 10-day fitness block in Florida and a 10-day on-court camp in L.A. Factor in intercontinental travel and you can count the off-days on just about one hand.
That’s not an off-season. That’s a long weekend.
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Recommended reading:
🏆 The winners of the week
🎾 WTA:
🏆 Viktorija Golubic (No. 7 seed) def. Celine Naef 7-5, 6-4 to win the Limoges Open (125) in Limoges, France. It is her fourth WTA 125 title.
📅 Coming up
🎾 ATP
📍Jeddah, Saudi Arabia: ATP Next Gen Finals featuring Arthur Fils, Alex Michelsen, Jakub Mensik, Learner Tien.
🎾 Exhibition
📍Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates: World Tennis League featuring Iga Swiatek, Daniil Medvedev, Aryna Sabalenka, Nick Kyrgios.
Tell us what you noticed this week in the comments below as the men’s and women’s tours continue.
(Top photo: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
