An impulsive late-night text has brought about a crowd-pleasing combination at Wimbledon: Andy Murray and Emma Raducanu on the same mixed-doubles team.
“It was quite late yesterday evening when I sent the message,” Murray revealed on Wednesday, shortly after his latest training session at Aorangi Park. “It would have been after 9pm so I was a bit worried she might have been in bed. But I got a quick reply. She said: ‘Yeah, let’s do it’. That was it.”
Here was an eye-catching move from Murray, who was forced to withdraw from the singles event on Tuesday after failing to recover completely from surgery on a spinal cyst only 10 days earlier.
He had already entered the men’s doubles alongside brother Jamie. But the partnership with Raducanu will offer Murray another spin of the dice as he looks for one last roof-raising win at Wimbledon, the tournament where he claimed singles titles in both 2013 and 2016.
“We’d spoken about it a few years ago during the Covid year [in 2021] but obviously both of us were doing quite well in the singles and it didn’t happen,” Murray explained.
“Yesterday I was chatting to my team and we were discussing mixed. Last night I messaged her coach [Nick Cavaday] and asked if he thought it might be something she’d be up for doing. “He said it was worth asking, so I did, and she said yeah, she’d be up for it.
“It should be fun. I have played mixed doubles a few times when I was young and then the last time was with Serena [Williams]. I really enjoyed it, it’s something we rarely get to do. And to get a chance to do it with Emma… well, it’s my last chance to do it, so it should be good.”
Murray has already run one successful mixed-doubles campaign on these courts, when he and Laura Robson teamed up to land the silver medal at the London Olympics in 2012.
Murray also entered the Wimbledon mixed-doubles event in 2019 with Williams. The famous pairing won their first two rounds before coming unstuck against Bruno Soares and Nicole Melichar.
Options might include Raducandy or Maducanu.
He and Williams had different views on which portmanteau name should be used for their team, however, with Murray preferring SerAndy and Williams suggesting Murena.
In the case of this new partnership, options might include Raducandy or Maducanu. Calling them the Randies might give the wrong idea.
As a former slam champion who won the 2021 US Open, Raducanu makes for a high-profile partner. Yet her doubles experience is all but non-existent. She has played just one tour-level match, teaming up with her Danish contemporary Clara Tauson at the Citi Open in Washington DC two years ago.
The scratch partnership went down to a swift and unsurprising 6-4, 6-1 defeat against Lucie Hradecka and Monica Niculescu, two much more seasoned doubles players.
It will be interesting to see how Raducanu copes with the short-range volleys required by the mixed-doubles format. While she is normally most comfortable when playing from the baseline, Murray suggested that she should be able to adapt.
“A lot of the skills from singles translate well to doubles,” said Murray, who played against Raducanu in a mixed-doubles match that was staged at the National Tennis Centre during the pandemic year of 2020.
“There’s a few things that are obviously a little bit different, particularly when you play against doubles players who are doing a lot of movement at the net. But she’s a brilliant returner and great ball striker so I’d imagine she’ll deal with returning guys’ serves well.”
Entering the mixed doubles via a wild card, Murray and Raducanu have been drawn to face El Salvador’s Marcelo Arevalo and China’s Shuai Zhang in the opening round. The match is likely to be played on either Friday or Saturday.
Asked if the pair would practise together beforehand, Murray said: “I don’t think so. We’ll warm up for the match, but obviously her priority will be her singles practices, and we’ll work around that.”
And how about the chemistry between the pair? “I don’t know, hopefully good. She’s obviously unbelievably competitive and likes playing in the big stadiums so I expect she’ll deal with that really well.
“I chatted a little bit with my team about it and they were saying ‘What exactly do you want to get out of it?’ Firstly we want to be competitive in the matches. And then playing with another Brit as well is something that would be nice. She’s obviously one of the top, top British players and she would have been top of the list.”
Murray and his brother face Australian pair Rinky Hijikata and John Peers on Centre Court on Thursday.
Double act proves Murray is a real women’s ally
The news that Andy Murray will team up with Emma Raducanu in the mixed doubles at Wimbledon later this week was what every tennis fan wanted to hear.
Very rarely do sportsmen and women have the luxury of ending things on their own terms. After withdrawing from the men’s singles draw at the start of the week, linking up with the former US Open champion after all his injury battles could be the next best denouement to Murray’s career, alongside his doubles display with his brother Jamie.
It feels pretty symbolic, too. The term ‘male ally’ is bandied about a lot in women’s sport but throughout his long and storied career, Murray has been the perfect embodiment of one.
A fierce defender of female athletes, he has tirelessly used his platform to advocate for sportswomen, both in the tennis world and beyond. From appointing Amelie Mauresmo as his coach in 2014, when he proudly declared himself as a feminist, to calling out casual sexism in his sport (which purports to be one of the most gender-equal) he has been a true champion of sportswomen. It is part of the Andy Murray brand.
No more has this been true than at Wimbledon. Few will forget the time he boldly corrected a journalist following his quarter-final defeat to American Sam Querrey in 2017, when a male reporter lazily suggested that Querrey was the first US player to reach the semi-finals.
“Male player,” Murray interjected. The reporter laughed it off, but Murray appeared unimpressed. That same year, he also criticised sexist scheduling at the All England Club, when higher-ranked female players were demoted to lower courts, a theme that continues to dog tennis.
His double-act with Raducanu has echoes of the time he partnered with Serena Williams in the mixed doubles five years ago. If this is to be one of his final acts, it seems like the perfect parting gift.
Source Agencies
