I fancy Emma Raducanu’s chances at Flushing Meadows

British tennis fans famously only acknowledge the sport exists for a couple of weeks in the middle of summer in SW19. But they ought to think about changing the habit of a lifetime over the next couple of weeks, as Emma Raducanu prepares to defend her US Open title at Flushing Meadows.

It’s been a dizzying year for Bromley’s best. Her journey from star-struck ingenue when she went to New York a year ago to her arrival back there this week as the champion and the face of a thousand magazine covers must have felt like a rocket ride to the Milky Way. But now she has to prove herself all over again. Since winning the US Open a year ago at just 18, she has failed to win another singles title and has won just 12 matches out of 28 on the WTA tour.

But things are looking up for her again. Last week she played Serena Willams (now 40) in an eagerly awaited match at the Cincinnati Open. Serena, who admittedly barely moves these days though she can still give the ball an almighty whack, was dismantled by Raducanu, who a few hours later went on to do the same to Victoria Azarenka, another multiple Grand Slam champion.

In those two matches Raducanu lost a total of six games over the four sets. They were two massive demolition jobs, and Raducanu was playing with a force that I haven’t seen since the US Open last year. Ominously for her opponents, she reckons she’s now playing better than she was then. She has come in for some heavy flak recently, not unconnected to her array of lucrative sponsorship deals, as well as her frequent changes of coach (she’s now with Russia’s Dmitry Tursunov on a ‘trial’ basis). She admits it’s been a tricky year.

There was no shame in how she went out in Ohio. She was up against Jessica Pagula, the US No. 1 and a real powerhouse who can belt the ball even harder than Raducanu. Pagula is having the best year of her career and eventually ran out a 7-5, 6-4 winner. But it was a thrilling match, full of tactical nous from both sides of the net. Raducanu’s problem is that she cruised through last year’s US Open so easily she didn’t have time to hone her game against the best in the world. Now she is, and after losing to Pagula, Raducanu, as gracious as ever, said: ‘I feel like I’m heading in a good direction again.’ She certainly is, and should at least get to the semis in New York. And then the sky’s the limit.

Poor old Anthony Joshua has copped some heavy blows for his rant after losing out narrowly to Oleksandr Usyk of Ukraine in an absorbing fight in Jeddah. It all seems a bit unfair: Joshua grew up with few privileges, but has real charm and talks a lot of common sense. And anybody can be forgiven a bit of a rant after being battered for nearly an hour by a super-skilled Ukrainian who has spent months in military fatigues, hardening himself up fighting Putin’s army.

Bravo for Ben Stokes and his devastating honesty about his own troubles: less so for his bullish remarks in the aftermath of England’s hammering by the world’s best Test team, South Africa. It would have been nice if he had expressed some regret for the thousands who couldn’t now come to the Saturday of a Lord’s Test. England's opening pair is clearly deficient, and the pace attack not a patch on the Proteas'. Thankfully Ollie Robinson is back, but Sam Curran deserves it too. And Harry Brook and Ben Compton deserve a chance to open the batting at some point.

So at the moment the big question is: when exactly do you finally drop a Test player after they have failed, failed, and failed again? Judging by their public utterances, the chances of Baz and Ben dropping Zak Crawley would seem to be the same as Ryan Giggs being made poet laureate. Yet the moment has surely come.