Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Arruabarrena is off to a flyer in Bogota, Dan Evans is the unlikely top seed at a clay event, and Nuno Borges tries to bring his winning ways to the Challenger tour.
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 34, the number of consecutive games won by Lara Arruabarrena to start her campaign in Bogota this week. Ranked 167th, the 29-year-old Spaniard had to start in qualifying, where she dispatched both Carol Zhao and Yuliana Monroy by equal scores of 6-0 6-0. The first main draw round brought her 982nd-ranked Colombian wild card Jessica Plazas, and Arruabarrena nearly kept her perfect run going, reeling off 10 games before winning 6-0 6-1. The Spaniard seems to be a specialist in clay-at-altitude, or at least she must love Colombian food: Of her 7 career finals above the ITF 10K level, four have come in Bogota, and a fifth in Cali, a lower-altitude locale in Colombia. Arruabarrena has had a frustrating time of it since the restart last summer, so this is just what the doctor ordered. Her second-round foe is Jasmine Paolini, who she beat at this tournament two years ago. Plenty of other players would be favored ahead of her to win the Copa Colsanitas title, but no one in the draw has better memories of the Colombian capital.
Our second number is 3.3%, the pre-tournament probability that top seed Dan Evans would win the Sardinia Open title this week, per Tennis Abstract Elo ratings. That sounds low because it is: the 32nd-ranked Brit entered the tournament as the 11th favorite, despite outranking everyone else in the draw. The true top pick at the beginning of the week was unseeded Laslo Djere, one of the many players whose stature has suffered due to the lack of a proper clay season last year. With two days of play in the books, Djere is still standing, with a 12.3% chance of taking the title, but another unseeded player, Aljaz Bedene, has overtaken him as favorite. Kudos to Evans for choosing to compete on clay, on which he has only four tour-level wins. But beyond his first-round bye, he isn’t likely to win even a single match: His first opponent is Lorenzo Musetti, the 19-year-old Italian and recent Acapulco semifinalist, who destroyed Dennis Novak yesterday, 6-0 6-1 in 52 minutes.
Today’s third and final number is 38, the number of professional matches that Nuno Borges has won since last summer’s restart. Borges is almost two years removed from an outstanding collegiate career at Mississippi State, where the 24-year-old from Portugal won 121 singles matches, one of the many categories in which he tops the Bulldogs all-time list. Since September, he has climbed from 598 in the official rankings to 378. Even though almost all of his wins have come at the ITF M15 level, that seems like a weak payout for winning 38 of 47 matches, including three titles and another three finals. With the Challenger tour in Portugal this week, he gets another shot to test his game against a higher level of competition. He’s already taken advantage, with a straight-set win over 186th-ranked 2nd seed Enzo Couacaud. He won’t face another seed until a possible semi-final matchup with the American Ernesto Escobedo, so this may finally be the week that Borges takes his winning ways to the next level.
