Will Emma Raducanu be able to stay at the top in tennis for years to come?

How big a name is Iga Swiatek in your household? Bianca Andreescu?

Each has unexpectedly won a grand slam tennis tournament as a teenager in the past five years, and neither has yet repeated the trick.

Emma Raducanu has all the tools to be a force for years to come, but it is not a given.

The immediate future is as bright as the red shirts she sported on her unstoppable march to US Open glory, with her 10 successive wins and no dropped sets.

Because the world rankings are based on a 52-week system, the Bromley 18-year-old is certain to see hers continue to improve until at least next year’s Wimbledon.

Essentially, your ranking is likely to rise if you do better than the same week 12 months earlier. This time last year, Raducanu’s main focus was her A-levels.

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When the US Open began she was ranked at 150, one place above fellow Briton Harriet Dart, who beat her in the round of 16 at Nottingham in June.

Now she is in the top 25, above multiple grand slam champions Serena Williams and Viktoria Azarenka.

That is not to say she would necessarily beat them. We don’t know, and nor does she.

The fact is the highest ranked player she beat in New York was world number 12 Belinda Bencic.

However, she saw off Leylah Fernandez, who had three of the world’s top five among her victims on the way to the final.

And Raducanu has the power, poise, energy, calm, steel, intelligence of approach and variety of shot to (at least) threaten any opponent.

She has shown – in the last three months as her forehand has been transformed from a minor weakness to a major strength – a capacity for unusually rapid improvement.

There are further advances to come. Her volleying technique won admiration from Martina Navratilova, and few alive are better qualified to judge.

When experience gives her a better sense of when to advance to the net, and practice bestows more confidence in her overheads, she will be a more formidable opponent still.

Dangers lurk.

Injuries, loss of form, burnout, ridiculous “nation-expects” hype come Wimbledon time, multiple off-court demands on her energy and concentration, and social media distractions, to name a few.

She has excellent people around her – she will need more of them.

In the last major final to be contested by two teenagers (US Open, 1999), 17-year old Serena Williams beat Martina Hingis.

It proved the first of (so far) 23 grand slam singles titles for the American.

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Watching Raducanu courtside was Tracy Austin, who won the same title in 1979 aged just 16. Austin enjoyed many further triumphs, but after a series of injuries, only one more singles grand slam.

For Emma Raducanu, reaching Williams’s level might well be several steps too far, as it has been for everyone else.

Matching Austin’s success would guarantee her superstar status for years to come, and she has shown enough to justify hopes of achieving even more.

What an exciting time for British tennis, and for women’s sport in this country.

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