MELBOURNE, Australia — In 2020, Iga Swiatek won her first Grand Slam title at 19.

The following year, Emma Raducanu won her first Grand Slam title at 18.

The pair of teenage major winners have followed divergent paths since then. Swiatek has added four more Grand Slam titles to her tally, spending over 100 weeks as world No. 1 in the process; Raducanu hasn’t reached the final of a single WTA Tour event, let aloneanother major.

Their Australian Open third-round match on Saturday is one of the most consequential of Raducanu’s career since winning the U.S. Open in 2021. She has gone deeper in a Grand Slam before, reaching the Wimbledon fourth round last year, but she has never played an opponent ranked higher than world No. 7 at a major.

Raducanu’s career record against top-10 players is 2-7, with an 0-3 head-to-head against Swiatek, but she has won her last two matches against top-10 opponents at Eastbourne and Wimbledon respectively. After a heavily disrupted 2024, 2025 brings an immediate test against one of the best players in the world.

Swiatek and Raducanu, now 23 and 22 respectively, took very different trajectories en route to their first Grand Slam titles. Swiatek’s breakout tournament at the 2020 French Open came on the back of numerous Grand Slam main draw match wins and a junior Wimbledon title, while Raducanu won the 2021 U.S. Open as a qualifier, a once-in-history tennis moment.

Raducanu laughed Thursday when talking about breakthroughs in the wake of beating friend Amanda Anisimova 6-3, 7-5 to set up the meeting with the world No. 2.

“I know that she was playing since a very young age and my hours in comparison were probably a bit comical when I was 17 or 18, playing six hours a week,” she said in a news conference.

“I don’t think it was the same trajectory.”

In that junior Wimbledon title run, Swiatek met Raducanu in the quarterfinals. She won 6-0, 6-1.

The contrast has persisted since their respective first major titles, with Swiatek winning Grand Slams on multiple surfaces (clay and hard courts) while Raducanu either flattered to deceive in the wake of suddenly and infinitely increased expectations or suffered continual misfortune with injuries. Her career has been one of consistent rebuilds, while Swiatek has won at least one major in each of the past three seasons, picking up 22 singles titles and the 2024 United Cup’s “most valuable player” title after winning all of her singles matches.

In 2022, when Swiatek won both the French and U.S. Opens, Raducanu was having her first proper season on the WTA Tour — as a Grand Slam champion. Her results were good when presented as a rookie player trying to navigate a full season for the first time, with one semifinal and a couple of quarterfinals. They were less good by the normal standards of a Grand Slam champion. Raducanu ended the year ranked No. 75 after a first-round exit at the U.S. Open saw her lose 2,030 points and plummet from No. 11 to No. 83 in the space of two weeks.

It was a year of frequent coaching changes for Raducanu. Having won the U.S. Open with Andrew Richardson, she replaced him with Torben Beltz just two months after winning the title. By April 2022, Beltz was out and Dimitry Tursunov, who had worked with Annett Kontaveit while she reached No. 2 in the world, was in.

Tursunov didn’t continue beyond a trial period of a few months, telling Tennis Majors that there were “red flags” he could not ignore. Sebastian Sachs arrived in December 2022 and lasted until the following June, making it five coaches in less than two years for Raducanu. Richardson had replaced Nigel Sears in July 2021, just two months before her U.S. Open win.

“Anything that’s not necessarily serving me, I’m just pretty savage in terms of just prioritizing myself and focusing,” Raducanu said on Thursday in Melbourne. “Anything that wants to try and affect that, I don’t have time for it. No hate. I just don’t want to kind of let that in.”

Coaches are asked to put together PowerPoint presentations to explain their thinking — she has always had an incredible focus and demand for excellence. Even as a junior, she would seek out coaches who could help her with specific shots. She’s obsessed with the why of things and won’t just jump because she’s told to.

She said on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme in October 2023: “l ask my coaches a lot of questions. On certain occasions, they haven’t been able to keep up with the questions I’ve asked and maybe that’s why it ended.”

Beltz was brought in to improve her forehand and when that wasn’t happening, Raducanu saw little point in carrying on.

Emma Raducanu with Dimitry Tursunov at the 2022 U.S. Open (Julian Finney / Getty Images)

A big moment in the next Raducanu rebuild came at the end of 2023 when she hired Nick Cavaday as coach. The pair worked together when Raducanu was a junior and had discussed a possible partnership earlier in her senior career, with the timing on both sides not working out. He joined her team towards the end of a 2023 season that had been dominated by another recurring theme in her career: injuries.

She missed the majority of the season after double wrist surgery and an ankle operation, which together meant she played just five events and ended her season in April. While Raducanu was in the early stages of rehabilitation, Swiatek was scooping up a third French Open, her second in two years, and a fourth Grand Slam title overall.

Cavaday is still in place 13 months later, an eternity compared to how long her previous coaches have lasted. Raducanu responds to his clarity of thinking and style of communication, with a focus on offering evidence and data to support what he is saying. Cavaday’s technical expertise also allows them to work on specific shots — especially the forehand and serve — which has been a key factor in Raducanu’s previous coaching decisions.

At this year’s Australian Open, the forehand has been potent, but the latter is a work in progress. Raducanu will meet her opponent on Saturday with the more settled team, as Swiatek eases into life with Wim Fissette. Fissette has coached former world No. 1 players Naomi Osaka, Kim Clijsters and Angelique Kerber, winning six Grand Slam titles in total, and looks to be returning Swiatek to the devastating but controlled aggression that has seen her dominate the sport. Her succession of too-similar defeats under former coach Tomasz Wiktorowski, in which she descended into a tailspin of overhitting groundstrokes in the face of peaking opponents, looks a long way away.

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Swiatek is yet to suffer a defeat to Raducanu; Raducanu is yet to win a set against her. They crossed paths in 2024 for the third time after the Brit moved her ranking up from No. 285 at the start of the season to No. 58 by its close. She met Swiatek at the WTA 500 Stuttgart quarterfinal, which Swiatek won 7-6(2), 6-3.

Raducanu entered the tournament as a wildcard because she is a brand ambassador for Porsche, who also sponsor the event. Later in the year, Raducanu posted a picture of herself driving her £100,000 Porsche Cayenne after rumours spread that the company had taken back a car they’d gifted her when she was spotted taking a public bus in London. In December, Raducanu told a small group of reporters that she would cut down on sponsorship days.

Last year also brought that run to the Wimbledon fourth round, but it was overshadowed by her decision to withdraw from her mixed doubles with the retiring Andy Murray to protect her wrist ahead of her fourth-round match.

Raducanu felt she had no choice. Murray was gutted. His mother, Judy, called it “astonishing” on social media. Raducanu faced a lot of criticism for doing what most players would have done in the same situation before she said tennis “doesn’t feel different at all” when asked about Murray’s absence at the U.S. Open. She added that the way tennis works means that even someone like Murray moving on is “old news the next day.”

Even without that episode, Raducanu has faced challenges in connecting with the wider sporting public. In Melbourne, she spoke about the Murray situation in a less matter-of-fact way than previously.

“Afterwards, I sent him a long message, basically: ‘If I caused any trouble I guess at Wimbledon, that’s definitely the last thing I want,’” she told a small group of reporters.

“He’s someone that I’ve grown up looking up to and I don’t want any bad blood or harsh feelings with him.”

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Raducanu is aware of the importance of an athlete’s public image and met with a group of British journalists for an interview and an informal lunch in December in which she explained some of her goals for 2025. After hiring fitness trainer Yutaka Nakamura, who has worked with Grand Slam champions and world No. 1s Maria Sharapova and Naomi Osaka, Raducanu said: “I think I can become one of the best athletes in tennis. I think he’s really going to help with that.”

At that time, Raducanu had only just returned from a couple of months out after spraining foot ligaments at the start of September. She’d had a tricky period before that, too, opting against trying to qualify for the pre-U.S. Open hard-court swing and then arriving at the U.S. Open undercooked.

In her pre-tournament news conference, Raducanu spoke of how good she was feeling, but after losing to Sofia Kenin, Raducanu cried in her post-match duties. “I feel down, I feel sad,” she said.

Raducanu arrived in Melbourne under similar circumstances after a back spasm picked up while tying her shoelaces meant she arrived at the Australian Open with no match practice.

Both of her victories to date, against No. 26 seed Ekaterina Alexandrova and then former French Open semifinalist Amanda Anisimova, have been scrappy but clutch when necessary. She has won her last eight tiebreaks, including two against Alexandrova. Her tweaked serve has been shaky, but she has relied on her ground game and worked through physical issues to shield the problems with her serve. Raducanu received treatment on her back when 0-3 down in the second set against Anisimova, before winning seven of the next nine games to take the match.

Emma Raducanu has been impressive during her first two matches in Melbourne. (Shi Tang / Getty Images)

Her defensive tennis was outstanding against Anisimova, hustling across the baseline to draw errors by forcing one more shot out of an increasingly erratic opponent.

“I was able to get to some balls that maybe I wouldn’t have been able to previously,” Raducanu said afterwards.

When asked about their divergent paths over the past few years, Swiatek was philosophical. “Everybody’s story is different and everybody struggles with different stuff,” she said in a news conference on Thursday.

The expectation is that Swiatek will be too strong, but being in the position to take on the world’s best players feels like an important step for Raducanu.

“When we’re going to be out there on the court, whoever is going to play better will win, and that’s it,” Swiatek said.

(Top photo: Robert Prange / Getty Images)