Emma Raducanu loves to tinker with her own technique. She sees herself almost as a tennis scientist, running daily experiments in the lab.

This is unusual. Where most players look to improve their games through constant repetition and sheer weight of matches, Raducanu is always seeking the magic tweak that might give her the edge over her rivals.

We saw both the pros and the cons of this tendency on Tuesday.

The downside could be observed in Raducanu’s serve, which she has amended for at least the third time in the last year. It was a huge liability, coughing up 15 double-faults, and making her literally the faultiest player in the entire women’s draw.

And yet, Raducanu still got the job done, beating 26th seed Ekaterina Alexandrova in straight sets to reach the second round of the Australian Open.

How did she do it? Well, her reconstructed forehand played an important role. It was solid and reliable, regularly forcing Alexandrova out wide to her own forehand and opening up the court.

The latest serve tweak

Let’s start with that lamentable serve. It rather looks as though Raducanu began amending the motion at the start of the off-season, but was prevented from rehearsing it adequately by the back spasm she suffered in mid-December.

She has been looking for a magic bullet on her serve for a while. You can see the progression from our accompanying video, which shows three completely different start positions that she has used over the last year.

During the hard court events last spring (far left), she was pointing the racket face at the ground during the takeback. Then, during the grass court swing in midsummer, her newly abbreviated motion began with the racket face pointing to her left. Now, she is setting up with the racket face pointing at the sky.

It’s not all bad. Raducanu’s new motion has coincided with a significant improvement in her flat serve out wide from the advantage court (bottom left to top right on your TV screen or vice versa). She had excellent results on this serve against Alexandrova, hitting four of her nine aces with it and also using it to stave off danger on the biggest point of the match: the set point that she faced late in the second set when Alexandrova missed her backhand return long and wide.

On the second serve, however, Raducanu was struggling to get her wrist through the ball. Which was a serious problem, because wrist pronation is the movement which generates spin and control. This is a tricky action to describe, but try putting your right hand flat on the top of your head with your fingers touching the top of your left ear. Then swivel your hand, keeping your palm in contact with your hair, until your fingers are pointing forward.

The job of the pronation is to apply the curve and topspin that brings the ball down after it passes the net. You can see from our graphic that most of Raducanu’s misses were balls that flew too far. Without that curve, it’s very easy to miss long.

The good news is that Raducanu is such a tennis professor that she can probably figure this kink out pretty quickly – maybe even during a practice session on the day off before her second-round meeting with Amanda Anisimova.

“I think it had a mind of its own,” she said of her serve after the Alexandrova win. “But I’ve had experience having teething problems with it, I’d say, and then being able to come back and fix it for the next match. Part of it comes with first-round nerves as well.”

An athletic forehand

Tennis might seem like a simple game – put the ball in the court more often than the other mug – but there are plenty of different ways to skin a cat.

On the forehand side, Raducanu has made significant alterations to her swing since she won the US Open playing fast and relatively flat. You might wonder why anyone would want to change something that worked so well. But conditions play a huge part in this sport, and the 2021 US Open used unusually light balls. So light, in fact, that Craig Tyzzer – coach of the world No 1 at the time, Ashleigh Barty – complained that “If they keep that ball the same, no one like Ash will win that tournament.”

Fast, flat and handsy: that’s how British players usually approach tennis. This is no coincidence, because most of them have grown up playing on fast indoor courts where you can slap the ball around like a table-tennis player. Europeans tend to be stronger in their biomechanics, because they learn the game on slow red clay.

Admittedly, Raducanu brought more snap, power and dynamism to her forehand than the average Brit; she could hardly have won the US Open otherwise. But when she tried to follow up on her extraordinary breakthrough, she found that the shot was less effective when deployed in slower, heavier or windier conditions than those prevailing in the high-walled bubble of Arthur Ashe Stadium. In fact, it was all a bit vanilla.

The problem was particularly acute at Wimbledon in 2022, where she barely hit a winner on that side, and seemed to have regressed to the safety-first “semi-Western” grip that she used during much of her junior career.

Well, things have definitely picked up from there, and much of the credit should go to Nick Cavaday: not only the man who ran Bromley Tennis Centre when she was playing red-ball junior tennis, but also her coach for the last 12 months.

Cavaday has encouraged Raducanu to play what he calls a more athletic forehand. Instead of simply stepping into the ball and taking it early, with a lateral swing like a beachgoer skimming a stone, he wants more leg drive, more jumping into the ball, more rotation of the body, and thus more topspin and work on the shot.

The new-look shot might thus be described as more of an ATP forehand than a WTA forehand, because this is the way the men play – using shape and spin to control the ball and thus expand their target area – rather than the women who often hit flat and low over the net.

Alexandrova’s forehand is a classic example of the latter type, and she did a lot of damage with it, striking 14 winners to Raducanu’s seven off that wing. But it’s also a less reliable option, and she missed 34 forehands to Raducanu’s 20. In a tight match where Raducanu won 94 points to Alexandrova’s 88, that made all the difference.

Seeking the complete game

There is a sense of optimism around the Raducanu camp at the moment, stemming from the recent appointment of fitness trainer Yutaka Nakamura and her own improved sense of self-possession.

It was revealing to see her joking about her serving issues after her win. She clearly believes that she can iron out the kinks in her delivery by Thursday, when she is due to take on world No 39 Anisimova. And there are plenty of reasons to be hopeful about that clash, despite Anisimova’s heavy weight of shot.

As the former British No 1 Tim Henman put it, during a punditry stint on Eurosport’s Australian Open coverage: “If you can serve 15 double-faults and still end up winning, it probably means that the other areas of your game are working pretty well.”