Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Margarita Gasparyan charges into the St Petersburg quarter-finals behind an eye-popping one-handed backhand, El Shapo leaves his opponents helpless on return, and Wimbledon announces a timetable to finally move its qualifying tournaments on site.
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 119 kilometers per hour, roughly 74 miles per hour, and the speed of a Margarita Gasparyan one-handed backhand return winner yesterday. Gasparyan’s one-hander isn’t known for its gracefulness, but it got the job done against Katerina Siniakova. Of the four singles matches in St Petersburg, Gasparyan was the only straight-set winner, while the other three all went to third-set tiebreaks and lasted at least 2 hours and 50 minutes apiece. Gasparyan is one of the few remaining WTA representatives of the once-mighty one-handed backhand; the effectively-retired Carla Suarez Navarro is the only one-hander in the top 100. That will change on Monday, as Gasparyan’s upset of Ekaterina Alexandrova today pushed her back into double digits. Even better, Viktorija Golubic reached the quarterfinal round in Monterrey to make it three. Justine Henin and Amelie Mauresmo they are not, and it’s hardly a dent in the hegemony of the double-fisters, but it is a start.
Our second number is 28, Denis Shapovalov’s service-hold streak through three matches in Dubai this week. Opponents Jan Lennard Struff, Hubert Hurkacz, and Jeremy Chardy have all failed to win a single return game, earning just three break points between them and winning fewer than 2 in 10 against the lefty’s serve. El Shapo is getting better as he goes, allowing only six total return points to Chardy in yesterday’s quarterfinal. The 21-year-old Canadian is known for his big serve, but this is only the second time he’s gone unbroken for three straight matches. Last time was at Tokyo and Shanghai in 2019, before he ran into Novak Djokovic, who won three of 9 return games. Shapovalov has a much better chance of keeping the streak alive this time, as he faces surprise semifinalist Lloyd Harris, the 81st-ranked South African who knocked out Dominic Thiem earlier in the week. In his career at tour level, Harris has won only 35% of return points and broken about twice every ten return games. If the South African is to continue his career-best run, it will probably take a tiebreak or two, the one chink in the armor of any big server.
Today’s third and final number is 7, the number of remaining years for off-site Wimbledon qualifying rounds at the Bank of England Sports Centre in Roehampton. The All England Club announced yesterday that they plan to go ahead with this year’s Wimbledon Championships after cancelling the 2020 event due to the pandemic. Infection control remains a factor, so the AEC will suspend the traditions of the queue and ticket resale, along with skipping the invitation doubles events and requiring that players stay in tournament hotels. But for tennis hipsters like me, the big story was buried by these latest Covid updates. Wimbledon is physically expanding after buying the nearby Wimbledon Park Golf Club, and will eventually be able to host qualifying rounds on site without compromising the quality of the grass courts used for the main event. We finally have some idea of the timetable, as the switch is expected by 2028. That gives players and fans seven more opportunities to partake in a tradition that already dates back nearly a century, at a no-frills site that hearkens back to a simpler time when tennis tournaments had not much food, not many chairs, and acres and acres of grass.
