Britain’s new tennis star Jack Draper wants to emulate his friend Emma Raducanu as he looks ahead to a blockbuster US Open semi-final against world No1 Jannik Sinner on Friday.
Raducanu famously romped through the 2021 US Open draw without dropping a set, so becoming the first qualifier to land a major title. Her victory over Leylah Fernandez in the final turned the title of the Pogues’ Christmas hit, Fairytale of New York, into a universal sporting headline.
Draper might not be quite such an unheralded meteor, having arrived at this event as the No 25 seed. But there have been obvious echoes of Raducanu’s breakthrough as he cashed in on an unexpectedly open draw by reaching the last four with five successive straight-sets wins.
Just like Raducanu, Draper has given the impression of a player floating on a cloud of confidence, and somehow managing to avoid looking down.
“I haven’t really thought of anything,” he said after his quarter-final thrashing of 10th seed Alex de Minaur. “I don’t think much is kind of going through my mind. It’s a little bit weird.”
Later, Draper told reporters that “What Emma did was obviously incredibly inspiring. I’ve known her from a young age, and to see what she did was incredible.
“I was very proud of her, very excited. Obviously, we’ve watched the likes of Andy Murray winning a grand slam from Great Britain, but her winning, it was just really a fairy-tale run.
“I definitely think as a competitor, it fuelled my fire. I really wanted to achieve what she’d done, winning a grand slam. At the same time I do understand that the men’s and the women’s, it is different. We’re playing five sets. It’s a different physical challenge and all these types of things. [But] I learned a lot from watching Emma win, that run, and how amazing she was.”
The 2021 US Open was an outlier in many senses. Played in the shadow of the ongoing Covid pandemic, it had an unfamiliar vibe and threw up two first-time major champions in Raducanu and Daniil Medvedev.
Runner-up Fernandez came in as the world No 73, while the coach of Ashleigh Barty – who was the dominant world No 1 at the time – would later complain about the unusually light balls.
Returning to 2024, Draper’s draw has been so convenient that one wonders if his New York entourage – coach James Trotman, physio Will Herbert and brother/agent Ben – might also include a witch-doctor.
Let’s take his opponents in turn. In round one, Zhang Zhizhen retired with a knee issue in the third set. The next contender, Facundo Diaz Acosta, looked like he would much rather have been playing on clay, and wasted little time in baling out.
Botic van der Zandschulp struggled to reprise his career-best win over Carlos Alcaraz in the previous round (a familiar scenario for giant-killers), before Tomas Machac threw in a stinker on his maiden appearance in the second week of a slam.
Then, on Wednesday, de Minaur woke up to find that his ongoing hip issue had stopped improving – as had been the case through the rest of the tournament – and gone into sharp reverse instead. “I was not expecting today,” de Minaur whispered, at a post-match press conference that found him on the verge of tears.
“Best draw EVER!” said one long-time tennis observer in a text message. And yet, for all Draper’s undoubted fortune, he has helped to make his own luck with a series of nerveless performances.
Any one of those opponents could have caught a wave of inspiration if Draper had allowed them – and indeed de Minaur did play considerably better after seeing Draper ask for medical attention early in the second set. (Draper later insisted that his strapped-up right thigh “didn’t turn into a problem”.)
And yet, every time that Draper has come under pressure, he has snuffed out the danger, usually by bending his lefty serve so sharply that his opponents have been pushed out towards the courtside advertising hoardings. After five rounds, he has saved 90 per cent of break points – 11 per cent more than second-placed Ben Shelton in the tournament charts.