Emma Raducanu claimed her best win of 2026 by some margin as she breezed past world No 18 Sorana Cirstea 6-4, 6-2 at Queen\u2019s Club. It was also her first win over a top-20 player for over a year.<\/p>\n
While this statement tells us something about the excellence of Raducanu\u2019s performance, \u00a0it also hints at the weakness of her results to date. Alarmingly, the previous highest-ranked opponent she had beaten all season was world No 57 Magdalena Frech.<\/p>\n
Cirstea, a 36-year-old Romanian playing her final year of a consistent career, has been enjoying contrastingly strong form, and would be a top-10 player based on 2026\u2019s events alone. Already this season, she had thumped Raducanu 6-0, 6-2 on the hard courts of Cluj-Napoca, in a match where Raducanu showed the first symptoms of the viral illness that would dog her for months to come.<\/p>\n
But these two had also met on grass at Wimbledon in 2021, in the tournament where Raducanu first came to the attention of the world\u2019s tennis fans. Raducanu\u2019s 6-3, 7-5 win on No 1 Court was a seminal moment in her emergence as a potential star.<\/p>\n
The surface makes a considerable difference, because Raducanu\u2019s fleet-footed game is at its most dangerous on the grass. The skiddy bounce gives extra penetration to her groundstrokes, which can be a little lightweight in slower conditions.<\/p>\n
In this match, she broke Cirstea at the first time of asking with a series of raking returns, and then defended her own serve determinedly. To only be broken once against such a high-quality opponent was a measure of a much improved performance on that crucial shot.<\/p>\n
Because of Thursday\u2019s wash-out, Raducanu will have to come back again to play her quarter-final this evening, which will be a test of her stamina and resilience.<\/p>\n
More to come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Emma Raducanu claimed her best win of 2026 by some margin as she breezed past world No 18…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1022075,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4105],"tags":[236651,1070,241094,93,79,1068,16,15,10101,5069],"class_list":["post-1022074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-apple-news-free","tag-emma-raducanu","tag-live-priority","tag-sport","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-womens-sport","tag-wta"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116737636201914239","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1022074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1022074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1022074\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1022075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1022074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1022074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1022074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}