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Emma Raducanu's telling Australian Open comments were sign of another coach split
Reach Daily Express | January 31, 2026 4:39 AM CST

Emma Raducanu has officially parted ways with Spanish coach Francis Roig following her Australian Open second-round defeat. The British No. 1 lost to Anastasia Potapova last Wednesday and announced that she was no longer working with Roig just eight days later.

Since making her tour-level debut at the 2021 Nottingham Open, Raducanu has now ended nine different coaching partnerships. But her decision to split from Roig wasn't a huge surprise, given some revealing comments she made following her 7-6(3) 6-2 loss to Potapova in Melbourne.

The world No. 29 confessed that she wasn't quite happy with the game she was playing, and wanted to return to the style she had when she was younger. Raducanu planned to "re-evaluate" once she got back to the UK, and wasn't in a huge rush to get back on the practice court.

"I think I want to be playing a different way, and I think the misalignment with how I'm playing right now and how I want to be playing is something that I just want to work on," she explained.

"I think there are definitely pockets of me playing how I want to play, and it comes out in flashes, which is a positive, and maybe more than certain times in my career in the last few years. But it's not how I want to be, like, consistently every day."

As for what she wanted to change, Raducanu added: "At the end of the day, I just want to hit the ball, like, to the corners and hard. I feel like I'm doing all this variety, and it's not, like, doing what I want it to do. I need to just work on, you know, playing in a way more similar to how I was playing when I was younger.

"I always just changed direction, took the ball early, and went for it. I think I do have the ability to do many things on the court, but I feel like as I'm learning all those skills, it's like I need to stick to my guns a bit as well and work on that."

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Reading between the lines, it appeared the 2021 US Open champion wasn't happy with the direction in which Roig was taking her game. She already had some problems with her forehand swing, which appeared to get longer and higher in recent weeks, a result of something she tried out with her Spanish coach.

"I think it's something that probably happened in the last few weeks. It's not something that I really wanted to happen, so I need to kind of look at that and shorten it, because I feel like it's good in certain conditions when it's a little bit slower. But on these very quick courts, it doesn't really work, so I need to adjust that," she said ahead of the Aussie Open.

"I think it's because I have been working on certain things with Francis, and on a particular shot, it works well, but we didn't really practice a different type of shot, which doesn't work so well. It's probably because we haven't done the latter. It's just drifted in that way. It's not something I want to continue."

It likely didn't help that Raducanu's pre-season was wrecked by a foot injury. She had high hopes for a month-long training block in Barcelona with Roig. In the end, she spent around two weeks there, working mostly on fitness with some static hitting.

The British No. 1 will be joined by Alexis Canter at her next tournament, the WTA 250 in Cluj, in early February. But Raducanu will likely be on the hunt for a mentor who can help her go back to her old game style.


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