Emma Raducanu’s new fitness coach Jez Green is best known for working with Andy Murray.
(Picture: Getty Images)Much of the focus will be on the fact that Emma Raducanu has parted ways with her fourth coach in just four months.
But there are plenty of reasons for optimism in the latest stop on the coaching merry-go-round involving the former US Open champion.
Gone is Dmitry Tursunov, at his behest rather than Raducanu’s unlike with her previous coaches it has to be said. But the British teenager has made an astute hire with the addition of Jez Green as her fitness guru.
It was the now 50-year-old Green who was central to turning Andy Murray from a player prone to physical frailties to one that won Wimbledon, the US Open and the Olympic title under Green’s watch.
Quite whether Raducanu sounded out Murray before she made the approach to Green is not known but it is an admission by the teenager that she has been remiss in failing to appoint a fitness coach up to this point.
Her first season on the WTA Tour was always going to have its gremlins but she has suffered more injury setbacks than most.
Blisters, not something a fitness coach can necessarily negate, flared up at various stages this season from the Australian Open in January to April’s Billie Jean Cup.
There have been other more troubling physical ailments, which Green might be more readily able to address from a hip injury in February to a back problem which curtailed her progress in spring.
Come the summer, an abdominal issue put her Wimbledon participation in doubt, a glute problem saw her pull out in Korea last month and she has now potentially ended her first season with a wrist complaint.
In the wake of her US Open title win in August last year, the key had been for a hefty winter training block, which was partly undone by a bout of Covid towards the end of the year from which she struggled to recover. For the rest of the year, it felt like her body has been playing catch-up.
Green is seen as the answer. Teaming up in 2007 before a parting of ways in 2014, he helped turn Murray into one of the fittest players on tour and his impressive CV includes having worked with the likes of Alexander Zverev and Dominic Thiem in the years since.
The central building block of any campaign for Green and Murray was a hard training camp in Miami each winter.
Green is likely to bring a similar training block to Raducanu’s regimen and the 19-year-old is not afraid of hard work.
Green’s own philosophy is deeply rooted in starting with a player’s movements and creating the building blocks from there. Raducanu is already a great mover so has the platform with which Green likes to work.
His approach has always tended to be a long-term one and the understanding is that he wouldn’t have signed up to work with his fellow Briton had it not been with a longer-term vision of their partnership.
Raducanu is crucially still coach-less but, in Green, she has made the ideal start for next season.
