Emma Raducanu almost certain to clinch her rankings goal as she silences her doubters
Emma Raducanu ended 2024 at No 56 in the WTA Rankings, with her always vocal army of critics quick to suggest the 2021 US Open champion may have found her place among the second or third tier of players in the women’s game.
After a series of near misses and a handful of thumping defeats against the game’s genuine trophy contenders this season, those doubters will argue Raducanu has yet to prove she is anything other than an outsider at the top table of the game.
Yet she has banished one notion over the last few months – namely that she lacks the commitment to the game required to compete at the top.
The 22-year-old has faced as constantly battled against negativity on social media platforms since her breakthrough Grand Slam title success in New York four years ago, with many of the snipers appearing to delight in her setbacks.
They would often suggest Raducanu doesn’t have the stomach to put the hard work in and battle to compete at the top of the sport, but she has ended that argument this season.
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If anything, Raducanu has played more tournaments than anyone would have expected, after previously suggesting she would never be a player who would play a full WTA Tour schedule.
She has won 26 matches at the highest levels of the sport this season and while that has been mixed in with 18 defeats, a winning record is a real sign of progress for a player who has also built up a physical resistance to the demands of playing top-level tennis and all the travelling involved with being on the road as a WTA Tour player.
It would be easy for Raducanu to sit back with the fortunes she has in the bank from that US Open win and the sponsorship deals that came on the back of it, but she has put in the hard yards this year and her reward is set to be achieving her rankings goals for 2025.
The 22-year-old Brit made it clear that she wants to claim a seeded berth for the first Grand Slam of the new year at the Australian Open and she will be assured of that position if she can find a handful of wins in the final weeks of the season.
She will play at two WTA 1000 events in China over the next few weeks and confirmed she is keen to push for more ranking points, as she is making her debut in Ningbo in mid-October before heading to Tokyo, Japan, for the Pan Pacific Open from October 20-26.
She has no ranking points to defend from this period last year, so this is a golden opportunity for Raducanu to head into the Australian Open as one of the seeds and she may even get more than that by the time she lands in Melbourne.
The levels she was showing as she reached three match points against former Grand Slam champion Barbora Krejcikova in her first event on the Asian swing at the Korea Open suggested she is playing top 20 tennis once again.
Now, if she can continue to find form and get a couple of favourable draws in Beijing and Wuhan over the next three weeks, she has a chance to be knocking on the door of a place in the top 20 by the end of the year.
She would need around 600 ranking points to achieve that goal and while that may be ambitious over four tournaments, a run to the quarter-finals in either of the WTA 1000 events in Beijing and Wuhan would be worth 215 points.
A more realistic goal may be a place in the top 25, but she has a chance to gain more points at the start of 2026, as she has limited points to defend prior to her return to Miami in March, where she was a quarter-finalist this year.
Raducanu will always be judged by different criteria than other players after her improbable breakthrough at the US Open, but a top 30 finish for a player who has overcome so many injuries should be hailed as a successful year of progress ahead of what could be an even more thrilling season in 2026.
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