Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Tsitsipas claims his first Masters 1000 title, Mihaela Buzarnescu is the BJK Cup’s first marathon woman, and Rafael Nadal will try again in Barcelona.
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 57%, the rate at which Stefanos Tsitsipas won his first-serve points in two shots or less yesterday. The dominant first-serve performance was key to his routine victory in the Monte Carlo final over Andrey Rublev, the first career Masters title for the 22-year-old for Greece. The average player on tour wins barely one-third of their first-serve points on clay in two shots or less; Tsitsipas not only far exceeded that, he also negated his opponent’s own power game. Rublev won only 40% of his first-serve points in two shots or less, and once the Greek dragged him into a long rally, it was one-way traffic. Of the 16 points that reached 10 strokes, Tsitsipas won 13 of them, sealing more than half of those with groundstroke winners. Stef’s reward for his dominant performance is a much-shrunken gap between him and a position in the top four on the ATP computer, as well as the #1 spot in the Race to the year-end finals in Turin. If he can sustain the level he reached against Rublev yesterday, he’ll find himself ranked first on more and more lists.
Our second number is 352, the number of minutes Mihaela Buzarnescu spent on court playing two matches in the weekend’s Billie Jean King Cup tie between Romania and Italy. The 32-year-old lefty is a former top 20 player, and while she’s now out of the top 100, the absence of Simona Halep and others brought Romania’s #7 to center stage. She played 5 hours and 52 minutes, including a 1 hour, 43 minute deciding set in her day-one loss to Martina Trevisan. The former Fed Cup has undergone a lot of changes, following the Davis Cup’s lead toward a single-site, year-end showdown, the first edition of which will be played in Budapest as soon as the pandemic sufficiently subsides. Also like the men’s international competition, the women’s event has retained a limited number of traditional home-and-away ties. The field for this year’s tournament was determined before Covid struck, so Italy—along with the seven other winners this weekend–merely advances to next year’s qualifiers, for another home-and-away tie to get into the 2022 Finals. Opinions differ about the radical shift in format, but Buzarnescu’s ultramarathon is just one example of something that remains abundantly clear: Players will go to extreme lengths when national pride is at stake.
Today’s third and final number is 11, the number of active players who have beaten Rafael Nadal on clay. The total increased by one on Friday, when Andrey Rublev dethroned the king in a three-setter en route to the Monte Carlo final, knocking Nadal’s won-loss record in the principality down to a mere 73-6. Rafa will be back in action this week at the closest thing he has to a home tournament, in Barcelona, where has has won the title 11 times, and where the field isn’t quite as strong. Of those 11 active players who’ve gotten the better of him, only 4 are in Barcelona, including Rublev, Monte Carlo champ Stefanos Tsitsipas, and Fabio Fognini, who upset Nadal at this tournament in 2015. Should Rublev reach the final and face Nadal again, he’ll have the chance to do what, among active players, only Fognini and Novak Djokovic have done before: beating Rafa twice in a row on his favorite surface. While the Russian is clearly a rising threat on slow surfaces, two wins against the king is probably a bridge too far.
