Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Stefanos Tsitsipas leaves no doubt that he can handle the unique challenge of John Isner, Anastasia Gasanova and Vera Zvonareva get through their St. Petersburg matches the hard way, and it’s 98 years since the birth of a remarkable figure in Norwegian tennis.
Scroll down for a transcript.
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Music: Love is the Chase by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2021. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: Apoxode
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Rough transcript of today’s episode:
The first number is 7.7, Stefanos Tsitsipas’s ratio of winners to unforced errors against John Isner last night in Acapulco. He committed only three unforced errors, including none in the entire first set, against 23 winners, itself a respectable mark in a match that took only 57 minutes. The Greek was dominant throughout, dropping only five points on serve—including one double fault—and taking almost half of Isner’s own service points. The big American often gets through matches quickly, but this was a new low. Only twice in his career has he lost a match in less than 57 minutes, and both of those were on grass. Isner hasn’t been terrible since the restart, winning a match in all but one of the tournaments he has played, but he has yet to make a deep run in the pandemic era. With two of his losses against Tsitsipas and two more against Sebastian Korda, the 35-year-old Isner must be wondering how long he can remain competitive against opponents more than a decade younger than himself.
Our second number is 11, the number of hours it took to get through five singles matches in St. Petersburg yesterday. The day started with two marathons, the first between Katerina Zavatska and Anastasia Gasanova. Gasanova came through a three-hour roller coaster to break into the WTA top 200 for the first time, simultaneously setting a record for the longest-ever match at the event. That mark lasted less than four hours—next up were Vera Zvonareva and Fiona Ferro, who went three hours and 13 minutes and played over 250 points before Zvonareva finally secured a deciding-set tiebreak. The three remaining matches were straight-setters, but Jelena Ostapenko tried mightily to keep the party going. In the evening’s final contest, she pushed Jacqueline Cristian to a second-set tiebreak, saved three match points, and earned a set point of her own before giving up the ghost, 11-9. Most of yesterday’s winners get to rest today, surely good news for the 36-year-old Zvonareva. But Gasanova has no such luck—after yesterday’s heroics, she’s back on court against 5th-seed Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova.
Today’s third and final number is 98, the number of years ago today that Laila Schou Nilsen was born. Schou Nilsen, who died in 1998 at the age of 79, was one of the best Norwegian women tennis players in the 1940s and 50s, winning 86 national titles. She twice competed at Wimbledon, though she didn’t win a match. While she didn’t make a mark on the tennis world outside of Norway’s borders, Schou Nilsen remains remarkable for her multi-sport prowess. In the late 1930s, she set speed skating world records at multiple distances, two of which stood until the 1950s. She won a bronze medal in the alpine combined skiing event at the 1936 Olympics, played 12 international matches with the national handball team, and even entered the Monte Carlo Rally four times. Norwegians don’t occupy much of the women’s tennis record book, but as a source of outstanding female athletes, the country punches far above its weight.
