If Emma Raducanu is going to make it through to the second week of Wimbledon for the second time in her career then she’s going to have do it the hard way, with the former champion Marketa Vondrousova and the world No 1, Aryna Sabalenka, blocking her path to a place in week two.
With 23 British players in the two singles draws – the most since 1984 – an all-British first-round match was always a high probability and Raducanu finds herself up against the Welsh teenager Mimi Xu in round one. Providing the 22-year-old British No 1, who has been nursing a back problem in recent weeks, gets past the world No 318, Vondrousova, the winner in 2022, is likely to be waiting in round two. A match with Sabalenka, probably the toughest task in women’s tennis right now on any surface, would be a third-round encounter.
Things are unlikely to be much easier for Britain’s men’s No 1 either, with Jack Draper landing in the same half of the draw as the top seeded Jannik Sinner, the seven-time champion Novak Djokovic and a host of big names, including the Americans Ben Shelton and Tommy Paul, Italy’s Lorenzo Musetti and Australia’s Alex de Minaur. Draper opens against Argentina’s Sebástian Báez, could play the talented Lorenzo Sonego in round two and then is seeded to play Alexander Bublik, the Kazakh who beat him at Roland Garros this month and who won the title in Halle last weekend. Djokovic, who admits Wimbledon is probably his best chance of winning a record 25th slam at the age of 38, would be a likely quarter-final opponent.
Jacob Fearnley – the British No 2 and world No 51 – has a mouthwatering shootout with João Fonseca, the 18-year-old Brazilian who many people expect to be hitting the top of the game before long. Ranked only six places below Fearnley, Fonseca beat Andrey Rublev at the Australian Open in January and won his first title in Buenos Aires the following month.
Katie Boulter and Sonay Kartal, both of whom are battling Raducanu for the British No 1 ranking, also face tough first-round assignments. Boulter plays the former world No 2 Paula Badosa while Kartal, who like Fearnley recently cracked the world’s top 50, faces the former French Open champion Jelena Ostapenko. And the US college player Oliver Tarvet, the world No 719 who became the first British man to reach the main draw through the qualifiers since 2017, will take on another qualifier, Leandro Riedl of Switzerland.
The draw was kinder to Carlos Alcaraz as he attempts to win the title for a third successive year, something players such as John McEnroe and Boris Becker could never manage. He plays Italy’s Fabio Fognini in the first round, with Alexander Zverev and Taylor Fritz the highest seeds in his half. The top seed, Sinner, beaten by Alcaraz in the French Open final after holding three match points, opens against another Italian, Luca Nardi. Denis Shapovalov, Tommy Paul and Musetti lurk as dangers in his quarter of the draw.
