OLIVER HOLT: How has Emma Raducanu been allowed to sink this low?

If Emma Raducanu never wins another tennis match in her life, she will have achieved more than the vast majority of elite players will ever achieve. She won a Grand Slam. She is a US Open winner. She is a history-maker. Last year, she was at the centre of one of the greatest sports stories that this country has ever produced and ever will produce.

In the aftermath of her first-round exit at Flushing Meadows last week and in the light of a debut year on the WTA circuit that has been characterised by misfortune and upheaval, practically every sports journalist I have read and every commentator I have listened to has been generous and fair in their appraisals of her progress.

Raducanu is 19 and there are only four other teenagers in the women’s top 100, so even when her ranking plummets to about 80 next week, she will still be in rare company. She came out of nowhere to win the US Open last summer and only the fanciful or the ignorant expected her to be challenging for more Grand Slam titles this year. That was never going to happen.

But what do we want now for Raducanu? No one is expecting her to be the next Serena Williams because Serena, who won 23 Grand Slam singles titles and has a claim to be the greatest tennis player of all time, redefined the women’s game and went on redefining it until the last shot of her career on Friday night.

After a week of utterly compelling performances, Serena finally succumbed to Ajla Tomljanovic in three sets in their third-round tie but not before she had taught us more about what is possible for a player in their 41st year if they have the hunger and the desire and the talent to do it.

There are elements of Serena’s early career that will give encouragement to Raducanu, too. Serena won the US Open in 1999, when she was 17, but then it was nearly three years until she won her next Grand Slam singles title, at Roland Garros in the spring of 2002. Raducanu has time on her side.

Her journey in this year’s American Grand Slam was of stark contrast to her title win last year

So if we are to be berated for harbouring unrealistic expectations for Raducanu, what is a realistic expectation now? Do we expect her, over the next couple of years, to return to the top of women’s tennis, knowing how much sacrifice that will entail? Or is that foolish? Should we accept that last year’s US Open was a glorious one-off?

The coverage of her progress has been overwhelmingly sympathetic but it was clear from the way that Raducanu bristled at something as innocuous as being referred to as the ‘defending champion’ ahead of her first-round loss to Alize Cornet in New York last week that she has felt trapped by the scale of what she achieved a year ago. Her demeanour, certainly, suggests that tennis no longer sets her free.

Ultimately, this is about what Raducanu wants for herself and if it remains an obvious and correct course of action to avoid criticism of her, it is wrong to be squeamish about asking hard questions of those guiding her career. The truth is that they have to do better. They have to do a lot better.

Let’s be honest about it: the past 12 months of her tennis life have been a dog’s dinner in terms of her progression. Off the court, guided by IMG, she has earned vast amounts of money, enough to set up for her life. That part of the equation has been managed well. On the court, her first year in the spotlight has provided an example of how to get it spectacularly wrong. At a crucial stage of her development, when the vast majority of ex-players and analysts are agreed that stability in her coaching set-up is the key to becoming established as an elite player for the long term, those around her have enabled Raducanu to have had at least four different coaches in the last 16 months.

The 19-year-old Brit was beaten in straight sets 6-3 6-3 by France’s Alize Cornet

There have been so many changes, it has been hard to keep track. She went into last year’s Wimbledon with the respected Nigel Sears alongside her, then he was dropped. She won the US Open under the guidance of Andrew Richardson but even though she played tennis from heaven in that partnership, he was dropped, too. Raducanu said she wanted to replace him with someone ‘who has been at that level [the WTA Tour] and knows what it takes’. German coach Torben Beltz was next on the conveyor belt before he was let go. A couple of interim coaches came and went before US-based Russian Dmitry Tursunov was hired ahead of this year’s US Open.

Given his nationality and the impact it will have on Tursunov’s ability to travel, it does not seem like too big a stretch to suggest this latest arrangement may also have a limited shelf-life.

Injuries have blighted her year, too. Perhaps that was predictable, given the increased physical demands on her as she tried to adapt to the WTA Tour. But it is worrying that the blister problems on her right hand, which hampered her so grievously at the Australian Open at the start of the season, were still affecting her badly at Flushing Meadows.

Raducanu has been blighted by injuries this year having nearly missed out on Wimbledon 

Those injuries suggest that there are no issues around her work ethic and her fierce desire to succeed, but questions have been asked, correctly, about why more attention has not been paid to developing a steady health and conditioning team around Raducanu. Again, the people advising her need to step up in that department and give her the help she needs.

Because at the end of all this, 12 months on from the fairytale of New York, what we are left with is the worrying sight of a young woman who carries the careworn air of a player for whom the words ‘defending champion’ connote fear and loathing and for whom tennis appears to have become characterised by joylessness and pain.

Whatever we want for Raducanu now, anything is better than that.