English No.1 Splits With ‘Intense’ Croatian Coach

Current no. 1 ranked female tennis player in Britain Laura Robson has split with her ‘very intense’ and ‘prickly’ Croatian coach Zeljko Krajan.

Robson, who beat world no. 4 Agnieszka Radwanska on Monday in Madrid, has revealed that the two have parted ways after a testing nine months together. Croat Krajan, who took Dinara Safina to world number 1, has a reputation for being a hard taskmaster.

“He was just putting too much pressure and with every ball I missed and every match I lost I was just putting myself really down because he was very, very tough,” is how Slovakian Dominika Cibulkova described her time working with the former player.

The Telegraph reports that Krajan’s relationship with Robson was ‘always a meeting of very different minds, because one of them is an easy-going 19-year-old who just happens to be a tennis player, while the other finds it difficult to understand anyone who does not live and breathe the game 24 hours a day, and that Krajan felt that Robson was not training as assiduously as he would have liked, while she lost confidence and enthusiasm during a grim run of results that brought her two victories from nine matches on the WTA tour between the Australian Open and this week’s tournament in Madrid’.