Emma Raducanu has said she is going to “re-evaluate” her game after being knocked out of the Australian Open.
The British number one and 28th seed was beaten 7-6 6-2 in Melbourne by Anastasia Potapova in the second round of the first Grand Slam of the tennis season.
Raducanu made a host of errors, particularly off the forehand, and looked despondent during a second set that quickly got away from her.
The 23-year-old had earlier looked on course to take the first set in windy conditions, but Potapova fought back from 5-3 down.
Potapova is ranked 55 in the world and was playing under the flag of her adopted country of Austria after switching from representing Russia at the end of last season.
Raducanu, who won the US Open in 2021, said afterwards she wants to be “playing a different way”, despite previously speaking positively about the work she has been doing with coach Francisco Roig since last summer.
“I think the misalignment with how I’m playing right now and how I want to be playing is something that I just want to work on,” she said.
“At the end of the day, I just want to hit the ball to the corners and hard. I feel like I’m doing all this variety, and it’s not doing what I want it to do.
“I need to just work on playing in a way more similar to how I was playing when I was younger.”
In the four-and-a-half years since she won a Grand Slam, Raducanu has turned to many different voices in an effort to establish herself at the top of the game but without finding any real consistency in results.
She said: “I think I’m going to take a few days, get back home and try and just re-evaluate my game a bit.
“Watch it back, see where I can improve. What I have been feeling and also what is visually apparent.
“I definitely want to feel better on certain shots before I start playing again.”
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Raducanu, who had struggled with a foot injury during pre-season, said she will not give herself “too much of a hard time” because of her preparation heading into the tournament.
“I just need to take it for what it is, be pragmatic, and go back and keep working,” she added.
She is next scheduled to play in her father’s home country of Romania at the Transylvania Open in Cluj-Napoca beginning on 1 February.
