Emma Raducanu flew to New York last week in preparation for her US Open title defence. At the same time, one of the architects of his success was 5,000 miles away on the Greek coast, sweating through fierce daily training sessions with a group of club players.
Mark Petchey, who was Britain’s No.1 in the late 1980s, takes a church-wide approach to tennis coaching. At one end of the scale, he’s a much sought-after sounding board for stars like Raducanu, whose game he reviewed two years ago, and Andy Murray. He’s also the ‘tennis ambassador’ for Neilson’s holidays, where his clients range from leather-skinned strategists to wide-eyed novices.
So it was that, last week, I found myself among 50 hopefuls at the Neilson Tennis Center in Messini, in the southernmost part of mainland Greece. The idea was to find out more about the exercises Petchey had used to restart Raducanu’s technique in late summer 2020. Better yet, I hoped to try them myself.
This was a rare opportunity, because you don’t often find a renowned trainer at a holiday resort like Messini Beachclub. As the man who helped Andy Murray to his first ATP title, as well as an Amazon Prime pundit and commentator, Petchey is a familiar face on our TVs, prominent enough for his Neilson charges to seek out selfies and technical advice.
His status among Britain’s tennis elite also explains why Petchey, who is 52, received a call from Raducanu’s then-agent John Morris in July 2020. He is usually too busy to make serious commitments coach, but the stars aligned during that Covid-19 crisis. summer Petchey wasn’t commentating and Raducanu wasn’t competing, so together they had a chance to reshape their foundations, an opportunity both sides were determined to maximize.
The results were historic. By adding more spin and control to Raducanu’s two most essential strokes: the serve and the forehand, as shown in the video below, Petchey gave the act one of the best feel-good scripts ever. Someday, the film version will compress its eight weeks of work into a training montage, probably with an upbeat soundtrack by Ariana Grande or Taylor Swift.
A cynic might suggest that similar remedial work is needed this summer. After Raducanu’s breathless late-season highs, he has suffered a predictable reversion to the mean. Their win-loss record between June and September 2021 stood at a sensational 13-3. Since then, the equivalent numbers are 14-17.
However, Petchey himself cannot identify any major technical flaws in Raducanu’s game. Even if it could, there will be no Covid-style pause for reflection and reassessment in 2022. In the build-up to Monday’s US Open, it is suspected that Raducanu’s latest coach, former top 20 player Dmitry Tursunov, will focus on recreating the good vibes of last summer rather than reinventing the wheel
“For example, it took Emma and I four weeks to fix the ‘waiter’s tray’ problem in her service action,” Petchey told me in Greece, during a brief pause in his relentless training program “In the middle of a season, where are you going to find that kind of time? Technically, most players are just trying to adjust to low maintenance, because major rebuilds just aren’t practical.