Emma Raducanu sensationally won the US Open under the guidance of Andrew Richardson whose reward was a firing not long after they won.
Raducanu was a qualifier at the US Open a few years ago making the main draw of the event and then pretty much easily smashing everybody en route to her maiden Grand Slam trophy. She's yet to repeat that sort of level again and some have blamed it on the coaching carousel that she's had since then.
The decision to part ways with Andrew Richardson who led her to that success raised many eyebrows and some experienced players spoke out against it. Despite all of that, Raducanu still parted ways with her coach and he has now broken his silence on the way all of it went down.
The fact of the matter is that a I had a nine-week trial contract that both Emma and I thought was a good idea to see how we would get on, and it ran through to the end of the US Open, stopping immediately afterwards. There was a period of time after that when I was keen to re-negotiate the contract. I wanted to carry on, and I had a plan that I wanted to put in place for Emma. This thing about ‘I wanted to go off and coach my son’ is not true, but it seems to come up all the time.
As Richardson points out there was a desire from his side to continue working with Raducanu however it seems like she wasn't too keen. One of the reasons for the split at the time was the experience of Richardson who didn't have much as a coach on the WTA with Raducanu looking for a more experienced option. She found it with Tursunov though he walked away from the job.
After probably ten days to two weeks (following the Open) I didn’t have a contract. We were in the process of re-negotiating and then I got a brief call from her agent telling me they were going to go in a different direction, and that was the end of it.
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