Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Medvedev needs two and half hours to reach the round of 16, Ana Konjuh is picking up where she left off in 2017, and Dominic Stricker triggers comparisons with better-known Swiss tennis players.
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 157, the number of minutes Daniil Medvedev needed yesterday to finally put away 86th-ranked Australian Alexei Popyrin and advance to the Miami fourth round. With the big three staying at home, the Russian is the top seed and heavy favorite, with an Elo-based forecast of a 45% chance to win the title. But the combination of Popyrin’s big serving and a third-set attack of cramps kept Medvedev on court much longer than planned. He was nearly unplayable on serve himself, winning 92% of first serve points allowing only a single break chance, but the 21-year-old Australian evened things up with a 20-point tiebreak in the second set. The two-and-half-hour-plus battle was the longest Medvedev had spent on court in a best-of-three since the 2020 ATP Cup, and the most time he’s needed against a player outside the top five since 2018. Safely in the round of 16, the Russian’s next opponent is Frances Tiafoe, who conveniently disposed of Dusan Lajovic, the Serbian who knocked Medvedev out of Rotterdam earlier this month. A bigger threat may await in the quarters: John Isner played his best match since the restart yesterday, and is the only man in this year’s field with a Miami title to his name.
Our second number is 8, the number of career top 20 victories for Ana Konjuh. The 23-year-old Konjuh has scored the latest two of these as a wild card in Miami, upsetting Madison Keys and Iga Swiatek back to back for a place in the fourth round. She’s no typical wild card, though: Her surprise US Open quarterfinal run in 2016, in which she knocked out fourth seed Agnieszka Radwanska, marked her as one of the top prospects in the game, and she first cracked the top 20 herself the following summer. Unfortunately, it’s been one injury after another since then, to the extent that Konjuh feared she’d never again play competitive tennis. If this week’s performance in any indication, those concerns can be put to rest. It’ll be an uphill battle to earn a computer ranking commensurate with her Miami performance, but if she keeps outhitting the likes of Keys and Swiatek, it’s only a matter of time.
Today’s third and final number is 2, the number of career challenger tournaments played by Dominic Stricker. The 18-year-old Swiss made the most of his second appearance on the circuit, riding a wild card in Lugano to a Challenger title. He becomes the third youngest Swiss player to win a tournament at this level, behind a couple of guys you might have heard of: Roger Federer and Stan Wawrinka. The 2020 Roland Garros boy’s champion spent the week alternating between easy matches and tough ones, needing over two hours to get past top seed Yuichi Sugita in Saturday’s semi, but breezing through yesterday’s final against qualifier Vitaly Sachko, winning 58% of points and refusing his opponent a single break chance. Stricker started the week ranked just inside the top 900, and he’s now nipping at the top 400, making him the third-highest ranked teenager in men’s tennis, behind only Carlos Alcaraz and Holger Rune. Nearly two decades after the arrival of Federer and Wawrinka, Swiss tennis has another young man on the track to stardom.
