BRITISH young gun Emma Raducanu is into the 2024 Korea Open quarter finals after putting away eighth seed and Seoul reigning runner-up Yue Yuan in straight sets. While the 6-4 6-3 defeat might appear as regulation, the match lasted two hours and four minutes and took Raducanu seven match points before closing out the contest.

The match points largely came in the penultimate game of the match when Raducanu was serving at 5-2. Yuan batted off five of them, before breaking the Brit in a form of resistance. However overcoming the disappointment at not closing out the match on serve, Raducanu steadied and got back to the task at hand, breaking Yuan to take out the match in just over two hours.

“Second set, a bit of nerves came in,” she said post-match. “I haven’t been in that situation much. I just had to remind myself I was a set and 5-3 up. I was ready to break, I’d been putting pressure on her service games all the time.”

Raducanu incredibly put down 11 aces which helped her win 72 per cent of her first serve points, hitting Yuan off the court at times with the Chinese seed failing to serve and ace and only running at 55 per cent success rate off her first serve. The Brit said she has been working closely with her team to improve that element of her game.

“If you watch my serve over the past few months, since the clay season it’s gone through a lot of iterations in terms of swing,” Raducanu said. “In general, if you play a lot of tournaments, things move out of place without you really realising, and then it’s harder to get the natural feeling back. We’ve been working hard the last week looking at the swing, and which swing suits me best. It’s been pretty big changes, it’s not like we’re just changing the ball placement.

“Me and my coach decided we were going to take a risk and we were going to tweak things. We know it might not pay off short-term. But one thing I do back myself on is I pick things up pretty quickly. In the first match it didn’t transfer yet, but today it definitely did. I just have to think bigger-picture. My goals are finishing this season strong but inevitably to set myself up in the best way possible for next year, because next year I really want to hit the ground running.”

Raducanu now has a tough matchup against Russian Daria Kasatkina in the quarter finals after the the number one seed knocked off American Hayley Baptiste 6-4 6-2. In other results, third seed Beatriz Haddad Maia defeated Aussie Ajla Tomljanovic 6-3 6-4 to take on lucky loser Polina Kudermetova in the last eight, while Bulgarian Viktoriya Tomova won via retirement against Amanda Anisimova when leading 7-5 4-1 and will now lock horns with Veronika Kudermetova.