Queen’s Club came to a standstill at lunchtime on Saturday. Jugs of Pimms were briefly left unsipped, ice cubes melted snugly against wine carafes, and phones were whipped out to capture the blue skies above.
Four games into Emma Raducanu’s quarter-final match against Kamilla Rakhimova, the Red Arrows flew over the Andy Murray Arena for Trooping the Colour, in honour of the King’s birthday. Raducanu, who was 40-0 up with the match on serve, paused to watch as the crowd applauded, before serving out the game, to even greater applause. Nothing could be more “British summer of sport” than this.
That was until six hours later when Raducanu was back on court and reaching her first ever grass-court final. In a 6-2, 6-2 semi-final win over Iva Jovic, Raducanu completed a feat that had seemed mentally and physically out of her grasp over the past couple of years in making a tournament final at this level. Perhaps she had been making a mistake for normally playing her quarter-final and semi-finals over separate days, although it is rare she even makes it that far.
Raducanu said she was “in awe of what was going on”, referring to the Red Arrows after her 6-3, 7-5 quarter-final win, but it was an apt description of what has conspired to happen for her this week. She has been unflappable, winning four matches on the bounce to set up a final on Sunday against Donna Vekić.
It could have been an all-British final with all three matches on the Andy Murray Arena on Saturday featuring a British player, thanks to a week of bad weather leaving a leftover quarter-final waiting to be played prior to the two semi-finals.
Thursday had been entirely rained off. Wind swirled around Queen’s throughout the week, leading tossed up tennis balls astray. On Friday, Elena Rybakina lost a point because her cap blew off just as she was about to hit the ball.
It was Raducanu who drew the short straw of playing her quarter-final and semi-final in one day. She overcame a slip, and subsequent medical timeout, in the second set against Rakhimova to make it through. Injury concerns immediately made any kind of comprehensive performance in the semi-final feel unlikely. It looked like the familiar Raducanu script would play out, where hopeful green shoots of promising tennis would be cruelly stamped on by injury, illness, mental breakdown or some combination of all three. It did at least mean that there were two British women in the semi-final, as she was joined on the other side of the draw by Katie Boulter, fresh from the biggest win of her career on Friday night, a 7-5, 2-6, 6-4 win over world number two and Australian Open winner Rybakina.
Virginia Wade was the last British semi-finalist at Queen’s on the women’s side, way back in 1971. There was no women’s tournament here from 1974, and it only returned here last year. During Serena Williams’s first-round doubles match earlier in the week, the on-court interviewer had to awkwardly ask her what it was like to play at the club, given there had not been a women’s tournament during her career. “Yeah, this one was always for the boys,” she deadpanned.
Unsurprisingly, the crowd was predictably biased in all three matches, as Rakhimova found out when she tried to pump up the crowd after saving a match point against Raducanu only to be met with a small smattering of applause and a hefty dose of bemusement.
It comes with its own challenges. A British crowd combines expectation with its support, particularly for a player who deigned to set a very high standard as a teenager which she has since fallen short of. Double faults will be tutted, and there were plenty of those. Serving does not appear to be a British strong suit right now, although Raducanu’s has greatly improved over the past 18 months. She was also forced to deal with the sure sense of revulsion as she was repeatedly called “Radders” from the stands, although she gamely said that she had appreciated it in her on-court interview following her win.
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For Boulter, her semi-final was clearly just one match too many, with the 29-year-old citing an illness last week in combination with having to play two matches on Friday, with her quarter-final against Rybakina taking two hours and 39 minutes. While on paper, Vekić might have looked beatable, having only entered the main draw as a lucky loser, she is no slouch on a grass court. She reached the semi-finals at Wimbledon only two years ago, as well as reaching finals in Berlin in 2023 and Bad Homburg in 2024. In the form she is in, she will be a formidable opponent for Raducanu in the final. But Raducanu has never needed reminding what a qualifier can do in a tournament of any shape or size.
If Boulter struggled with the scheduling, Raducanu had an even harder task, with her 18-year-old opponent Iva Jovic having beaten last year’s Queen’s and Wimbledon finalist Amanda Anisimova on Friday afternoon. Jovic has been having a breakout year after reaching the quarter-finals in Melbourne and is ranked 16th in the world, far above where Raducanu is right now. Yet it was Jovic who looked unsettled early on, losing the first set 6-2.
The duo traded breaks of serve in the second before Raducanu saved three break points at 3-1 and a further one at 4-2. In the past, this was the point where she would lose her head too easily, as a match seemed to begin to turn against her. Her mental resilience - including in earlier rounds where opponents she was steamrolling threatened to reel her back in - has stood out the most this week, more so than anything about her technique or physical capacity. In the end it felt unsurprising that she generated two match points on Jovic’s serve. She only needed one.
“This week has been incredible,” said Raducanu, fresh from punching the air repeatedly after her victory.
“I enjoy playing here and that shows in my tennis. My team and I have stuck through some tough moments in the last few months, so I want to thank them for getting me through.”
Raducanu might have won a Grand Slam, but the Benjamin Button nature of her career means that she has never made the final of a WTA500 tournament. She only made her first 250 final in February at the Transylvania Open, which she lost to Sorana Cîrstea, who she incidentally beat in the round of 16 here.
It might be too neat and too soon to point to the return of Andrew Richardson - her coach at that US Open - to her box by way of explanation. As at Flushing Meadows in 2021, she has not dropped a set all week. Today she will have a chance to win a first title in five years.
Photograph by Luke Walker/Getty Images for LTA