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SPORTSCENTRE Reporter

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PARIS – Bianca Andreescu started to feel a familiar pain in her right shoulder during her first- round win at the French Open.

"Pain that was similar to what she had in Indian Wells and Miami," said coach Sylvain Bruneau, "and then after she finished her match on Tuesday we felt that it was probably appropriate to get some testing done with doctors and get some images and it came back that, actually, it’s the same injury that she had, but it’s not at the same level, it’s not as bad."

A small tear of a muscle (subscapularis) in the rotator cuff forced Andreescu to retire from a fourth-round match at the Miami Open on March 25 and kept her off tour until the French Open. 

The diagnosis for the latest injury, which led Andreescu to withdraw from Roland Garros before her second-round match against Sofia Kenin, is that the Mississauga, Ont. native can't hit a ball for 10 to 15 days. 

Andreescu arrived in Paris riding a wave of confidence. She had won 10 straight completed matches dating back to her title at Indian Wells and clay is her favourite surface. Her excitement only grew after the draw when she learned Serena Williams was her potential third- round opponent, a matchup she had long dreamed of. Now, the opportunity is lost.  

"It was difficult," Bruneau said. "It was extremely difficult, because she was super happy to be back competing; she’s been practising, doing a lot of fitness. She had her eye on the French Open and being back on court and competing. She had that tough first round where she, as usual, fought really hard to go through and who knows what’s next. And then this comes up and it was a cold shower and she was very emotional and rightly very sad about it ... if she had kept playing and kept pushing and played a few more matches there was definitely a danger we could go back to square one and we don't want that."

The plan, prior to the injury, was for the teenager to play a couple tune-up events before Wimbledon – Birmingham and Eastbourne – but that will have to change. Birmingham is definitely off the table.  

"That's in roughly two and a half weeks and that's going to be too tight," said Bruneau. "We need to go slowly again. We need to be careful, we don’t want this to re-occur so there will be testing to see how it reacts, a lot of treatment. It's very difficult for now to say, ‘She’s going to be fine for Wimbledon.’ I’d love for her to be fine for Wimbledon, but it's too early to tell."

"Hopefully she'll get it right," said New York Times reporter Christopher Clarey, "and I hope she doesn’t rush back because, clearly, if it happened here after a good break it could happen again if she comes back too soon ...  The hard thing is that shoulders are tough in tennis, I mean, it’s a huge stress on that joint."

Wimbledon, the season's third major, starts July 1 and was actually the site of Andreescu's first Grand Slam main-draw match when she qualified at age 17 a couple years ago. But at this point Team Andreescu is focused on the big picture.

"It's a little bit of a concern," Bruneau admits, "because we felt we did everything the medical team said to do. But, I guess it was just a little too tight, maybe she needed another week, another 10 days, two weeks of progression to be fully ready. That’s how I look at it. When we arrived in Paris, I mean, we picked it up a little bit in the intensity, we had to, she had matches coming up and we needed to make it realistic in practice to give her a chance to actually do something. That’s the plan for her. The way she’s able to play she doesn’t come to a Grand Slam just to be there, she wants to do well."

Despite the injury issues, Andreescu has risen to No. 23 in the rankings and already won over much of the tennis community with her entertaining game style and engaging personality. 

"I've been covering tennis for 30 years and I’ve rarely seen a young player I’m that excited about just in terms of her game and her presence on the court," Clarey said. "Just has every shot, seems to have been coached beautifully, seems to have a wonderful footwork game in terms of how she moves around the court, how she plots out her points. Maybe she over drop shots a bit, makes some choices you can debate, but the shots are all there. That’s the thing that’s so exciting about it. And [she’s] a great athlete too. And seems to have a pretty incandescent personality, so not just a loss to Canadian tennis or to the Andreescu camp, but kind of a loss to women’s tennis that she’s not able to play in this tournament."

"She's a really nice girl," said Ottawa's Gabriela Dabrowski, Andreescu's Fed Cup teammate. "She's got a good head on her shoulders. She's got good confidence, she's really positive. It sucks that she's been injured and I hope she gets well soon, because she's got a really big game and, as Indian Wells shows, she can compete with the best.