Emma Raducanu returned to Queen’s Club with a scoreline that said plenty about where her game can go when it clicks. The world No 42 beat qualifier Anna Blinkova 6-0, 6-3 on Tuesday to reach the second round in her first match since the French Open.
The win mattered because Raducanu had not played for more than two months after post-viral illness, then came back to competition less than a week before the French Open. Two weeks on from a straight-sets loss to Solana Sierra in Paris, she looked sharper, more settled and far more comfortable on grass than she had at the end of the clay-court season. For readers following rakhimova-linked Queen’s Club coverage, it also marked one of the clearest early signals of how the women’s draw may shape up on the surface.
Raducanu said afterwards that the match felt like a useful step forward, not a finished product. She spoke about enjoying how she was moving, striking the ball and carrying herself on court, but added that there is still a lot more work to do. That balance matters. A routine win over a qualifier is one thing; turning it into a sustained grass-court run is another, especially after a disrupted spring.
Her progress sits alongside a more uneven picture elsewhere at Queen’s Club. Katie Boulter also moved into the second round, but only after recovering from a set and a break down against eighth seed Leylah Fernandez before closing out a 3-6, 7-6, 7-5 victory. The result underlined how quickly the grass can change a match, and how little room there is for a slow start even for seeded players.
The bigger injury news, though, came from the men’s event. Jack Draper withdrew from the competition that begins on Monday after not playing since he hurt his knee two months ago at the start of the clay-court season, only weeks after returning from a serious arm injury in February. Draper said his recovery was going in the right direction and that he would give himself one more week in an attempt to return at Eastbourne, calling the decision to miss one of his favourite events of the year very hard.
For Raducanu, the immediate task is simpler but still revealing: prove that Tuesday was not just a clean restart, but the start of a stretch. Her next match was not yet set out, but the shape of her summer now depends on whether this first grass-court win can become the kind of momentum she has been chasing since illness and injury interrupted her year.
