Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Alex De Minaur loses a clay court match, France drops another rung in the WTA power rankings, and women’s tennis returns to Cleveland after almost half a century.
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 .143, Alex De Minaur’s career winning percentage in tour-level matches on clay. Yesterday’s first-round loss to Alejandro Davidovich Fokina in Monte Carlo was his 12th against only two wins. Australian men generally aren’t known for their clay-court prowess—you have to go back to Rod Laver and Ken Rosewell in 1968 and 1969 to find a Roland Garros winner from down under. Lleyton Hewitt, De Minaur’s model, never progressed past the quarter-finals at the French, and there’s little reason to hope at this point that Demon will do any better. It’s easy to ascribe this sort of surface difference to familiarity or comfort, but it remains head-scratching: De Minaur’s grinding baseline game could work on dirt, and he has a Spanish coach. In two events at Challenger level in 2018, the Australian won seven clay court matches, beating Felix Auger Aliassime and a slew of Spanish specialists. He’ll have a few more chances to right the ship before grass season, but at the moment, he’s one of the few guys on tour who can make the Americans look like natural dirtballers.
Our second number is 0, the number of French women in the top 50 of this week’s WTA rankings. According to @AnnaK_4ever on twitter, it’s the first time since 1986. The last Frenchwoman standing was Fiona Ferro, who dropped twelve spots from 45th to 57th, joining Caroline Garcia, Kristina Mladenovic, and Alize Cornet in the oddly Gallic section of the rankings between #54 and #59. Elo concurs, ranking the same four women between 51st and 63rd. Of the quartet, 24-year-old Ferro is the best long-term hope to regain some national pride, though the only one in action this week is Cornet, fourth seed in Charleston. Her first-round match against Linda Fruhvirtova could hardly be more symbolic: The 30-something representative of a fading, once-great tennis nation attempts to hold on against a 15-year-old from the increasingly strong Czech Republic. While France has a few prospects of its own, notably 20-year-old Clara Burel and 18-year-old Diane Parry, irrelevance in the WTA rankings looks like it could become the new normal.
Today’s third and final number is 48, the number of years since a modest group of players descended on the 1973 Marie O. Clark Memorial, a USTA professional event played in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Yesterday brought the news that the WTA has sanctioned a new event in Cleveland, which slots into the calendar between Cincinnati and the US Open, and the tournament is claiming to bring women’s tennis to the city for the first time in history. Not quite—at that 1973 event, an 18-year-old Chris Evert only lost 9 games in four matches, which earned her $5,000 in prize money and some small print in the record books for the Forest City. The Czechoslovakian government is partly to blame for making the Clark Memorial so forgettable—they required Martina Navratilova to play the Czech International instead, making her a late withdrawal from the Cleveland event. Had she shown up and reached the semi-finals, it would’ve been just the third installment of the greatest head-to-head in tennis history, and perhaps Martina wouldn’t have needed to wait two more years before finally scoring a win against her long-time rival.
