Italian translation at settesei.it
On Tuesday, Bernard Tomic lost his first-round match at Wimbledon to Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. No surprise there: My forecast gave Tsonga a 64% chance of advancing, and that didn’t even take into account Tomic’s shaky health, which has caused him to retire from matches twice in the last six weeks.
Tomic-Tsonga immediately made the news, and for the wrong reasons. The Australian lost, winning only seven games. Ignominiously, the match lasted only 58 minutes, the shortest at Wimbledon since Roger Federer needed only 54 minutes to thump Alejandro Falla back in 2004.
The All England Club responded this morning, announcing that Tomic would lose his prize money. Officially, he “did not perform to the required professional standard.”
Fast and insufficiently furious
I don’t know whether Tomic performed to the required professional standard, because there’s no exact definition of “professional standard.” I suspect it’s some combination of the following:
- The player lost badly
- The player has a reputation for tanking
- The match got a lot of attention so we have to be seen doing something about it
What I do know is that Wimbledon officials are looking at the wrong number. Yes, 58 minutes is an extremely fast three-set match. But Tomic–even when he’s fully engaged and playing his best–is probably the quickest player on tour, often serving as soon as a ballkid gets him the ball. Tsonga also plays fast. Neither player is a good returner, and the Frenchman is a devastating server on a fast surface, so the points were always going to be short.
The more appropriate metric, then, is points played. Tomic and Tsonga contested 125, which is considerably less headline-grabbing than the time on the clock.
Fines all around!
Suddenly, Tomic-Tsonga doesn’t stand out as much. Since 2000, there have been 77 other men’s grand slam matches that required 125 points or less. That’s almost exactly one per slam. The list includes two quarter-finals, three semi-finals, and the 2003 Australian Open title match, in which Andre Agassi dispatched Rainer Schuettler in 76 minutes, needing only 123 points. If we expand our view to matches with fewer than 130 points, we’re looking at another 45 matches, including both of this year’s Australian Open semi-finals.
Simply put: It is not unusual for a men’s slam match to be decided with 125 points. Really good players sometimes lose that fast. It just doesn’t usually attract so much attention, because on average, 125 points takes an hour and 21 minutes to play.
Of course, there are plenty of one-sided contests in the women’s draw, as well. 125 points is about 42 per set, so the “Tomic line” is at 83 or 84 points for a best-of-three match. Since 2003, there have been 235 women’s singles matches of 83 points or less, including five at this year’s French Open alone. (Ironically, Anna Tatishvili’s loss to Maria Sakkari, which triggered its own unprecedented fine, lasted 93 points and 28 minutes per set.)
Reactionary
All of this isn’t to say that Tomic tried his hardest on Tuesday, or that he “deserves” £45,000 in an ethical sense. If tournament referees made it a practice to review video of every first-round match and dock the prize money of the one player who competed most lackadaisically, then sure, the Australian is probably that guy at Wimbledon this year.
But that’s not how it works. The “professional standard” clause is almost never invoked. Had Tomic frittered away more time between points in order to push this match over the one-hour mark, or the offender had been a player with a less checkered past, we wouldn’t be talking about it now.
If the All England Club were focused on the right metric–the amount of tennis played, not how long it took–Bernie’s speedy, casual style of play wouldn’t be in the headlines. After all, there’s another casual, mercurial Australian with a poor return game who deserves more of our attention today.