There are easy points to be scored with Emma Raducanu at the moment, but unfortunately few are favouring her side of the board.
It would seem this has been another one of those weeks where her bruises were accompanied by a familiar question: is she really doing enough to help herself?
I watched her match against Anhelina Kalinina at the Qatar Open on Monday.
It was neither pretty nor much o
f a contest – she was crushed 6-0 in the opening set and then lost a tiebreak in the second.
With that, she went out in the first round of an important tournament, having reserved her cleanest hits for an interview in the wake of defeat.
‘I was struggling with everything – serve, return, forehand, backhand,’ she said and not even the most loyal of her followers would waste a Hawkeye challenge against that one.
It was a bleak assessment of a poor performance, which ordinarily would be kept in the perspective of a young athlete feeling her way back from surgeries on three limbs in 2023.
Indisputably, the karma bill for one of the great British sporting stories of our time has been steep and cruel, and anyone possessing even a lukewarm heart would want such a likeable, talented 21-year-old to have a kinder run from here.
But those are conversations about luck and strokes which sit apart from the ones we might have about her recent judgement.
I’m thinking here of other comments she made in the aftermath of that loss to Kalinina, in which she gifted no fewer than 44 unforced errors to the world No 30.
She said it was hard to time the ball, to read its reactions off the hard surface, and from there she touched on the difficulties caused by shadows cast over the court in Doha.
‘Honestly, I think I need to practice training outside a bit more because it’s very different,’ she went on to add.
All of this could be taken in isolation as the subtle challenges that occur in a subtle game.
Except it is awfully hard to isolate this specific scenario from how she spent her time a couple of days earlier, when she sacrificed deeper preparation by attending the launch of a new luxury resort across the border in Dubai.
That was on the Saturday night and it was well-attended by those who do well by attending such gatherings – Jennifer Lopez was there, Idris Elba too.
At some point in the evening, Raducanu had her picture taken with Naomi Campbell and, quite tellingly, gave a shoutout on Instagram to her sponsors at Dior.
All of which is usually fine. It’s her business and a lucrative, fun one at that.
In a different context, in a different week, at a different point in her trajectory, it might have attracted those lazy snipers for whom Raducanu has been an easy target, and likely no one else.
But going out in Dubai on that precise Saturday was a bizarre decision, because was it really sensible for her to be there two days before her fourth tournament in 10 months and only the fourth of her comeback?
The word on the tennis grapevine, from those who truly know the game, is that it was not. Not at all.
This isn’t intended to be one of those po-faced, nuance-deprived discussions about how a young athlete spends their evening; it’s about how she chose to spend that specific chunk of time, because it fell three days after Ons Jabeur knocked her out in the second round of the WTA event in Abu Dhabi.
That five-day gap between the loss in Abu Dhabi and her match against Kalinina offered a choice, because the party in Dubai wasn’t an immovable object in her diary.
Had she made the semi-finals in Abu Dhabi, she would have been playing on the Saturday and if she then reached the final it would have on the Sunday.
To guarantee a spot on the red carpet long in advance would have been to bet against herself, so we can assume it was a decision made on the fly. Just as we can assume it made Dior happy.
But let’s consider the alternative option that was on the table for a player who has fallen to 262nd in the rankings and who badly needs court time and confidence.
She could have gone early to Qatar and used it to familiarise with the surface. To pick up the pace of the court and the reaction of the ball. To get used to being outside. In other words: the things she pointed out.
Those can seem like the boring particulars of tennis, but when you’ve fallen so far in the rankings, when you’ve strung together back-to-back wins only twice in 13 events spanning 18 months, the boring particulars are important.
They can be game-changers and they are also a little, well, obvious.
Or they should have been to her and those paid to give advice. One win in that points-rich tournament in Doha could have launched Raducanu 40 places up the ladder, but she chose a different path – it’s been reported that she instead had a quick hit on the outdoor courts on Sunday before a quick exit on the Monday.
It’s been hard to see Raducanu struggle so much since the fairytale of New York.
I recently found myself discussing her situation with the 17-year-old darts phenomenon Luke Littler as an example of how quickly things can go south in sport.
Littler being blissfully indifferent to many things, we shouldn’t read too much into his response – he didn’t seem overly familiar with her story or existence – but it is sad that Raducanu is a fit for such narratives.
Within them, her commercial activities have always been a talking point. At times they have been used, quite ludicrously, as a catch-all explanation for what has gone wrong.
Distractions, a head turned – that kind of chat, to go with what we say about her constant coaching rotations.
Eddie Jones, back when he was running England’s rugby team, put his voice behind those arguments just a couple of months after she won the US Open.
On that thorny topic, I’ve always preferred to follow the sharper judgement of our much-missed tennis correspondent, the late Mike Dickson, who maintained that a hard-working athlete mostly walked a sensible line with those obligations.
That the double-edged sword of endorsements worth £12m a year was predominantly handled with care and meticulous planning.
But this wonky trip across the Middle East has not been played well at all – it was an utterly daft way of breathing validation into those who might cast doubt about her priorities.
At this pivotal point in Raducanu’s career, when there are no guarantees over her direction of travel, it really would be the worst kind of unforced error if she started proving a few of them right.