Grass! Donna Vekic, Emma Raducanu and Ben Shelton enter the chat

**Catherine** (0:11)
Hello, and welcome to The Tennis Podcast, our first pod of the grass court season. The tennis never stops, folks. We're here to cover titles for Donna Vekic, Ben Shelton, Robin Montgomery and Kamil Majchrzak, plus a look ahead to the coming week's events and a deep dive on some interesting announcements from Wimbledon this week, including a hotly anticipated one on prize money. I say we are here.
That we is myself and David. David, how are you doing?

**David** (0:45)
I'm okay. In fact, I'm very okay.
It was interesting to arrive back in the UK from Paris and think, you know what, I'm all tennised out now. I've had enough for a bit. I'm going to just have a good rest and be normal person without tennis in my life for a minute. Oh, this looks like a good grass court match. Oh, and on it went, and I was hooked within about three hours, and I'd got the iPad on in the kitchen for the remainder of the week. And when it was raining, I was annoyed because there was no tennis on. So what can I say? I'm on the right podcast.

**Catherine** (1:22)
We all had Queen's on within like two hours of getting home, including Matt, who had a lot of washing and unpacking and repacking to do ahead of his trip to Chicago, which is where he is right now. And he actually is in actual Chicago right now, I think, and not in Bloomington, Illinois, which is where he spent the majority of the trip so far. He's running around Chicago. He's back tomorrow, I think, and he will be on our next pod on Thursday. So you don't have to miss Matt for long, folks. And if you do want to check in on him and see how he looks in a wedding suit, then Instagram is the place to go for that, folks. It won't disappoint.
We are going to start talking now about the tennis that has happened this week on the green, green grass starting at Queens and the WTA 500 there. Obviously, they introduced the WTA event at Queens back to back with the men's last year. The inaugural champion was Tatiana Maria, who controversially was not awarded a wild card to defend her title this year. She did qualify. She won through a round. She put in a valiant effort against Elena Rabackina and had a few things to say about not being given that wild card. The title was won by former Wimbledon semi-finalist Donna Vekic, a lucky loser from qualifying. She lost, did Vekic, to Anna Blinkova in the final round of qualifying. She gets in as a lucky loser after Marta Kosciuk's withdrawal. She finds out the day of her first match that she has got the place as a lucky loser.
She hot-foots it across London. She gets to Queen's. She starts her tournament. She finds herself in the final, which she wins 6-love, 7-6 over Britain's Emma Raducanu, who also had a sensational week. And David, if I was writing a film script about this week at Queen's and the two eventual finalists and champions, I think that the hook of it would be two players returning to past coaches and trying to recapture something of what they had with those past coaches. I felt like the parallels between them on that, I found really fascinating because, of course, we've known for a while that Raducanu is back working with Andrew Richardson again, who she worked with when she triumphed at the US Open in 2021 And Donna Vekic this week had David Felgate-Courtside, who was her coach when she first burst through onto the tennis scene at the age of 16, which was quite a long time ago now.

**David** (4:15)
Yeah. If you think she's 29 now, and if you go deep back into the archives of The Tennis Podcast, in I think 2013, March of 2013, when Vekic was 16, there are back-to-back episodes where I interviewed Donna in Miami, who was new on the circuit, and then her coach at the time, David Felgate, who in Donna's words, in the aftermath of today's win, raised her as a tennis player from the age of 12, and for many years after that too. David, obviously, a vastly experienced coach, he's worked with Tim Henman, had a similar kind of raising of him in all into the pro ranks, and he's worked with other people like Xavier Melisse and Dan Evans and many others over the course of the time. But I think he always hoped that she would have all of her best results with him there. Obviously, the way things tend to go, that didn't happen, they broke and now they're back together. I don't think it's an accident that players play their best stuff when they're with somebody that they feel comfortable with and who obviously has to have great coaching ability and has to understand the game and they need to be on the same wavelength. But you could see in Vekic and Raducanu just how comfortable they are with the people that were there from the past.