Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Novak Djokovic leads a Serb-heavy field in Belgrade, a German qualifier wades into the adult pool in Stuttgart, and the ATP Race keeps getting younger.
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 58.6%, the probability that Novak Djokovic will win the Serbia Open in Belgrade this week, according to the Tennis Abstract forecast. Belgrade hasn’t seen a tour-level event since it’s four-year run from 2009 to 2012, which Djokovic won twice in the three times he played. He’s an overwhelming favorite by any measure, but his loss to Dan Evans in Monte Carlo last week knocked his Elo rating down from otherworldly to almost-within-reach. The second seed, Matteo Berrettini, has a top ten ranking but little in the way of recent form, so the second-best clay court player in the field is probably Filip Krajinovic, the Serbian 5th seed who could face Berrettini in the quarterfinal round, and one of Novak’s many countrymen who figure to win a couple of rounds this week. Krajinovic is 29, just barely old enough to have a history at this event: In 2010, he knocked out an injured Djokovic by retirement. The fact that Serbia provided five of the eight seeds is testament to the talent factory that Djokovic has helped nurture—for almost a decade, there were no wild cards to in-country events, meaning that any Serbian player thriving on tour got there entirely on their own merits.
Our second number is 3, the number of professional main-draw matches played by Julia Middendorf, who qualified for the main draw this week in Stuttgart. The ITF ranks the 18-year-old German #40 among juniors, and she has a title and a semi-final showing at that level in the two tournaments she’s played this year. But nothing in her background foreshadowed her last few days: In two rounds of qualifying, she knocked out 202nd-ranked Jana Fett and 137th-ranked Tamara Korpatsch, each time losing the first set before winning the final two sets easily. She wasn’t the only German wild card to surprise in qualifying—a 17-year-old, Nastasja Mariana Schunk, did the same, though she fell to Belinda Bencic in straight sets yesterday. But Schunk at least had a ranking and a couple of pro semi-finals to her name. Middendorf is in truly unfamiliar territory, which will only get more unreal when she faces 27th-ranked Anett Kontaveit today. Oddly enough, Kontaveit’s last match against an unranked player also came in Stuttgart, when she faced Maria Sharapova fresh off the Russian’s drug suspension. Middendorf and Sharapova don’t have much in common, but the 18-year-old can take heart in the fact that on that day, the unranked player won.
Today’s third and final number is 23.5, the median age of the eight men atop the ATP Race to Turin rankings. Stefanos Tsitsipas, age 22, leapfrogged Andrey Rublev, Novak Djokovic, and Daniil Medvedev to the #1 position with his Monte Carlo title, but the order isn’t as remarkable as the overall youth of the group that would make up the field at the Tour Finals were it held today. After Djokovic, the second oldest player in the octet is 27-year-old newcomer Aslan Karatsev, followed by Medvedev at 25. Jannik Sinner is ranked 7th, in position to play with the big boys this November instead of defending his title at the NextGen Finals with his fellow 21-and-unders. Of course, it’s still early. It’s hard to imagine 34-year-old Rafael Nadal missing the cut after another eight weeks of clay tournaments, and 33-year-old Roberto Bautista Agut already sits in 9th place. But even if one of the geriatric Spaniards crashes the party, the 2021 Finals could be younger than last year’s, which would make it the youngest in more than a decade.
