Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Osaka’s clay-court results suggest greater things in store, Corentin Moutet takes a roundabout path to victory, and Alexander Zverev looks to catch back up with his peers.
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 82%, Naomi Osaka’s winning percentage on clay in 2019, the last season she competed on the surface. The world #2 has made her money on hard courts, winning the Australian Open and the US Open twice each. While she has never reached the final round of any professional clay-court event, she won 9 matches against only 2 losses on the European circuit two years ago. That doesn’t quite add up because there are asterisks involved: She withdrew from a Stuttgart semifinal against Anett Kontaveit and a Rome quarter versus Kiki Bertens, and she played a single clay-court match in 2020, a stinker of a Fed Cup rubber against Sara Sorribes Tormo that she lost 6-0 6-3. Osaka is ready to return in Madrid this week, where main-draw action starts tomorrow. The 23-year-old opens her campaign against a qualifier and will likely face a tough test as early as the third round, where she could meet one of Kontaveit, Maria Sakkari, and Amanda Anisimova. Perhaps Osaka watched Ashleigh Barty win last week’s Stuttgart and thought it could’ve been her. Based on her results when she’s healthy enough to play, the idea of a clay title for the Japanese star isn’t so far-fetched.
Our second number is 9, the number of match points required by Corentin Moutet to put away Marcus Giron in Estoril yesterday. Moutet should’ve had reason to expect a routine first-rounder, as he has multiple clay-court challenger titles to his name, and the American is playing only his second tour-level main draw on the surface. About two hours into the match, it still looked fairly straightforward: Moutet won the first set 6-4 and held a 6-2 advantage in the second-set tiebreak. Four points later, the Frenchman had lost four match points, and four points after that, Giron evened things up. Moutet nearly made a similar mess 10 games later needing five break points before he finally secured the decider, 6-4. According to Voo de Mar on Twitter, this isn’t a record—Evgeny Korolev needed 12 match points to seal a victory back in 2008. But after three hours of play yesterday, Moutet was surely content to advance, record or not.
Today’s third and final number is 5, the clay-court Elo ranking of Alexander Zverev, who leads the field this week in Munich. The 2021 exploits of Andrey Rublev and Jannik Sinner, and the recent clay-court successes of Stefanos Tsitsipas have pushed the German out of the spotlight, even though the 24-year-old remains firmly in the top ten and has been winning Masters 1000 events on multiple surfaces since 2017. A little time in the background may not be unwelcome: Much of Zverev’s press lately has focused on his behavior off the court, including accusations of domestic violence, a baby born to an estranged girlfriend, and a legal case regarding his shuffling of management teams. His on-court results haven’t unduly suffered—he won Acapulco last month, and in a six-event stretch between October and January, his only losses came against Daniil Medvedev and Novak Djokovic. The Tennis Abstract Elo forecast gives him a 44% chance of winning the title this week, starting with a match today against Ricardas Berankis, a fish out of water on clay. The 250-level title would be a good start, but to get his name back in headlines for positive reasons, he’ll need some bigger results at the upcoming Masters events in Madrid and Rome.
