Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Jessica Pegula deals Karolina Pliskova her worst loss in recent memory, Francisco Cerundolo tries to keep up with his younger brother, and Marcus Willis officially says goodbye.
Scroll down for a transcript.
You can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and elsewhere in the podcast universe.
Music: Love is the Chase by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2021. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: Apoxode
The Expected Points podcast is still a work in progress, so please let me know what you think.
Rough transcript of today’s episode:
The first number is 60, the number of minutes it took for American qualifier Jessica Pegula to oust second-seed Karolina Pliskova in yesterday’s Doha quarter-finals. The 6-3 6-1 beatdown was Pliskova’s quickest loss since 2018, and Pegula’s fifth win this week in 76 minutes or less. The 27-year-old American will soon be able to say goodbye to qualifying draws, as she will rise to at least 36th in the WTA rankings on Monday, an improvement of more than 40 places since August. Her Doha run comes on the heels of a career-best showing at the Australian Open, where she upset both Victoria Azarenka and Elina Svitolina before losing in three sets to countrywoman and friend Jennifer Brady. Pliskova’s momentum is headed sharply in the other direction. Since the restart, her win total is barely half of Pegula’s and she has fallen out of the top five. Her Tennis Abstract Elo rating tells an even harsher story, placing her outside the top ten. She hasn’t had a double-digit ranking on the WTA computer since 2016, but she will need to right the ship quickly to keep it that way.
Our second number is 81.4%, the winning percentage of Francisco Cerundolo across all levels since the tours restarted last August. The 22-year-old Argentine was overshadowed last week by his younger brother Juan Manuel, who emerged from obscurity to win the Cordoba title, knocking out three seeded players along the way. But Francisco has been steadily climbing as well, from #247 on the ATP computer in September to 137 today. He qualified for the Buenos Aires event this week and reached the quarter-finals with an upset of third seed Benoit Paire, coming back from one set down and ignoring the Frenchman’s spat with officials. While it’s the first time he’s recorded back-to-back wins at an ATP event, he’s been piling up Challenger victories, with titles in Split, Guayaquil, and Campinas last fall, and a final in Concepcion two weeks ago. Francisco’s results this week will bump him up at least six more spots on the ranking list, which will surely come in handy as he tries to hold off his surging younger brother.
Today’s third and final number is 208, the number of players who lost an ATP match to Roger Federer and are now retired from professional tennis. One of the more colorful of that group, Britain’s Marcus Willis, made his retirement official yesterday, calling time on a career that unexpectedly peaked in June 2016, when he qualified for Wimbledon, won a first-round match against Ricardas Berankis, and made his sole appearance on Centre Court against Federer. From the vantage point of 2021, Willis’s breakthrough performance is far more remarkable than the typical tale of a qualifying wild card somehow reaching the main draw, Federer aside. In the second and third rounds at Roehampton, he eliminated Daniil Medvedev and Andrey Rublev, currently numbers 3 and 8 in the ATP rankings. True, neither was even seeded in qualifying at the time, but the wins will give Willis plenty to brag about in retirement. While it’s tough to top a Centre Court selfie with Roger, he’s just one among hundreds of Federer’s victims. A much more select group of players have beaten the two hard-hitting Russians in the same event.
