“I really hope that I’m making Wales proud. I was in Swansea for 13 years so it’s really nice to be doing it for them as well,” she said.<\/p>\n
Members from her former club are now clambering for tickets to see their superstar in action at SW19.<\/p>\n
“There will be a lot of us heading up,” said David Williams, head coach at Swansea Tennis and Squash club.<\/p>\n
“It’s welcome to the big time, isn’t it? Your first match in Wimbledon against Raducanu, a fellow Brit, a US Open champion, it just doesn’t get bigger.<\/p>\n
“She’ll be on prime-time TV, she’ll be on a show court, you can’t wish for more, it’s an incredible draw and I know Mimi will be excited about that.<\/p>\n
“Yes, Emma is going to be the heavy favourite, but it will be up to Mimi to cause a big shock and if she can calm the nerves and excitement I think she’ll put out a good performance.”<\/p>\n
Williams worked with Xu from ages four to eight and said it was “pretty evident that we had something special on our hands”.<\/p>\n
“It was clear that she had phenomenal hand-eye co-ordination and that she was a complete athlete,” he said.<\/p>\n
“She was stronger, taller, faster than most of her peers at the time.<\/p>\n
“It was the way she trained, her determination, her focus, and she was almost training like a professional even at that really tender age, it was impressive.<\/p>\n
“What probably struck me the most with Mimi was her ability to learn. I’ve never seen anything like it since.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“I really hope that I’m making Wales proud. I was in Swansea for 13 years so it’s really…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":224002,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5010],"tags":[748,4884,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-224001","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wales","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-great-britain","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114766719489967404","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224001","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=224001"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224001\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}