British players have nightmare start to Wimbledon as 10 lose after Draper and Raducanu withdraw

LONDON: This Wimbledon couldn’t have started much worse for the home team.

After Emma Raducanu withdrew on the eve of the Grand Slam tournament with a stress fracture, Jack Draper followed suit on Monday by pulling out because of long-term arm injury.

That left the grass-court tournament without the two biggest names in British tennis.

And the lesser names soon tumbled out, one by one.

All 10 British players who completed their first-round matches on Monday lost. An 11th, Jack Pinnington Jones, was two sets down and trailing 4-3 in the third against American Brandon Nakashima when play was suspended because of bad light.

None of those 11 players were tipped to make a deep run, though, unlike Raducanu and Draper.

Raducanu won the 2021 U.S. Open while Draper was seeded No. 4 at Wimbledon last year and reached the U.S. Open semifinals in 2024.There have been a lot of painful moments in the last 12 months, but this one is definitely the absolute worst,” Draper, who had been set to play Taylor Fritz on Centre Court in the first round on Tuesday, said in a statement.

Draper’s withdrawal also scuppers a return to Wimbledon for two-time champion Andy Murray, who ended a 77-year wait for a British men’s champion when he won the tournament in 2013. Murray was set to be in Draper’s box during matches this fortnight after agreeing to coach him through the grass-court It’s so devastating for a player to have to withdraw the night before a Grand Slam and particularly for your home Grand Slam,” said Sally Bolton, the All England Club chief executive. “I’m terribly sorry for Emma. … It is devastating. For us, I suppose the good thing to look forward to is we’ve got lots of Brits competing.”

Those comments were made before the early mass exodus of home talent, which included a five-set loss by No. 26 Cam Norrie, a 2022 Wimbledon semifinalist who was the only seeded British man or woman in the tournament.