Russian coach left Emma Raducanu due to 'red flags'

Emma Raducanu's former coach, Dmitry Tursunov, has described "red flags" in her camp which pushed him to end their partnership.

Earlier this month, in her latest coaching shake-up, the former US Open champion announced Tursunov's exit. They had been working together for just two and a half months.

Russian-born Tursunov immediately moved on with Olympic champion Belinda Bencic - the third player he has coached this year. Despite the quick turnover, he has insisted a rival offer with Bencic was not the reason.

“I was walking away from Emma regardless of whether there was another [player] available or not," Tursunov said in an interview with TennisMajors.com. "We didn’t agree on the terms and there were some red flags that just couldn’t be ignored.”

Tursunov had high praise for Raducanu despite the short-lived tenure, which lasted through the US hard-court swing. He said the 19-year-old "doesn't act like she's a superstar" and had a "rare" attitude towards tennis.

Though he would not divulge who was ultimately making coaching decisions in the Raducanu camp, he suggested that pinning down a guaranteed long-term deal and "impressing" the wider team ultimately proved the biggest obstacle.

“Our trial period was over at the US Open but I stuck around, trying to see if there was going to be a way to impress the team," he said, laughing. "I really wanted to make it work. First of all, she’s absolutely great, she’s a hard worker and she doesn’t think or act like she’s a superstar. She is hungry to improve and is obsessed with tennis. I think it’s quite a rare combination. It was a very difficult decision for me to walk away from a player that I like and respect.

"I felt it was going to be an interesting project, but a very long-term project, and as a coach, you want to have a belief that you’re going to be at work for that period. But of course, with her coaching situation, there’s now a thought going through every coach’s mind… I could have stuck around, I could have agreed on everything that her team proposed. But, deep down, I felt like that wasn’t the right thing to do. Emotionally, I wanted to stay, but logically, I felt like I needed to leave. I felt like there were going to be problems later and I wanted to avoid them for my own peace of mind.”

Tursunov was Raducanu's fourth official coach of the last 15 months, along with Nigel Sears, Andrew Richardson and Torben Beltz. She is yet to find a firm replacement, but has signed up Andy Murray's former fitness coach Jez Green in the interim. The hope is that Green will be able to help Raducanu become more physically robust, after a season which saw her pull out of matches and tournaments through injury on numerous occasions.

Despite Raducanu's early success, Tursunov believes it would be "probably a two-and-a-half-year project" to help her get to the top of the game and that she needs stability in her coaching corner to achieve that.

"It’s going to take some time, but as I said to her and to pretty much everyone on her team: I think you just need to have one voice and just try that for a bit," Tursunov said. “The only difficult thing with her – that you actually have to do with every player – is trying to change certain things: she believed that she had to play a certain way. So I was trying to convince her to change that mindset and change her convictions about her own game... That’s what I was trying to do and there was maybe a minor difficulty with that but I think we got past that and were on the right track, and she was starting to trust me a little bit more. At least, that was my perception.”