Why DOES Emma Raducanu hold canning her coaches? Latest dismissal makes it seven gone in 4 years

The latest individual engaged to help Emma Raducanu relocate the elusive elixir she found at Flushing Meadows more than three years ago did not seem long for her world when he described the task of taking her on as ‘coaching suicide.’

Vlado Platenik also provided the first public acknowledgement of the unconventional involvement of Raducanu’s father, Ian, in appointing her coaches, during an eye-catching interview with a Slovak newspaper.

Someone has said of Platenik that his vast self-confidence and ego make him akin to a freight train. And some. He seemed to have improved her troubled serve, helping her find greater consistency with a higher ball toss in Miami.

But Raducanu said, after just two weeks working together, that the relationship ‘wasn’t quite heading in the right direction’ and, as someone memorably put it, Platenik was Raducanned.

While it is quite clear normal rules and orthodoxies do not apply to a 22-year-old who won the US Open three months after sitting her A-levels, it’s been seven coaches in little more than four years for Raducanu and yet she is back at square one again, cast in a period of chopping and changing coaches like so often before. This merry-go-round is interminable.

It’s not her fault that one of the coaches Raducanu seemed most settled with, Nick Cavaday, whom she has known since childhood, had to break their working relationship in January after a year because of health issues.

If she sacks them so often, why does Emma Raducanu bother hiring coaches in the first place?

Vlado Platenik is the latest victim of the 22-year-old’s hire-and-fire strategy – after two weeks 

She has binned off seven coaches in four years, including Andrew Richardson (left) after she won the 2021 US Open 

But the perfectionism in her search of the right individual has, more often than not, defied all understanding. 

Splitting with Andrew Richardson, who coached her through those sublime two weeks at Flushing Meadows, still seems like utter madness. 

Why on earth pass up someone core to that cherished, indefinable spirit which you would want to bottle and keep for all your days?

We’ve also seen her severance with Nigel Sears, who mentored her through her wonderful Wimbledon run in 2021. We’ve had her father’s observation that applicants were asking for too much money. We’ve heard her ask the press corps – in all seriousness – if they had any bright ideas as to who might help her.

After she split from German coach Torben Beltz two months out from Wimbledon in 2022, we heard her say she was looking for ‘a new training model’ – whatever that might have meant.

Taken with all the other extraneous events that have made her a career a non-stop drama – the injuries, the frightening awareness on two separate occasions that she was being stalked – Raducanu is screaming out for stability and constancy.

And given a coach satisfactory to her and her father does not seem to exist, isn’t this the moment to simply give up on the idea of having one?

Since her default mode is having old friends courtside – like childhood mentor Jane O’Donoghue, a former LTA national coach who now works for the Royal Bank of Canada, and LTA coach Colin Beecher – why not draw them all in, ad hoc, and just go it alone?

We first saw her split with Nigel Sears after she reached the fourth round of Wimbledon in 2021

Why not just draw together a gang of old friends for support and go without a formal coach? 

Torben Beltz was another coach to get the sack – just two months before Wimbledon in 2022

It wouldn’t be the first time Raducanu has done so. The workings of her unorthodox mind also saw her eschew the convention of partnering with a permanent coach in her early teenage years. So, she could do the same now. A fitness coach, a mental coach and allies who would keep her spirits up might just do.

Platenik said on Thursday that in ‘eight or nine days’ of work with Raducanu he had significantly altered her footwork and overhauled her second serve by eradicating a ‘bad toss’.

But Raducanu is stuck. Her career is still flatlining. As the red-hot scrutiny of Wimbledon and the grass-court season looms into view once more, the question of whether Flushing Meadows 2021 was a freak event is not going away.

She needs security and consistency – people she actually likes in her camp. Not this never-ending state of flux.