Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Ramos wins his third ATP title against left-handed competition, Petra Kvitova guns for another upset in Madrid, and Marcos Giron is the hardest-working man on the Iberian peninsula.
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 64.5%, Albert Ramos’s career winning percentage against lefties. While a couple dozen active players have more success against southpaws, Rafael Nadal is the only active left-hander with a better record against same-side opponents. Nadal’s mark isn’t so much a handedness preference as a tendency to dominate everyone, so Ramos stands out for the discrepancy between his win rates against lefties and righties. Ramos wins fewer than 45% of his tour-level matches against righties, and all three of his ATP titles—including his victory on Sunday in Estoril—have come against fellow portsiders. The Estoril Open draw was tailor-made for the Spaniard: three of his five opponents were lefties, from Fernando Verdasco in the first round to Corentin Moutet in the quarters to Cam Norrie in the title match. Unfortunately for the latest member of the ATP winner’s circle, lefties are only slightly more common on tour than in the population in general. And even worse, some of them have Ramos figured out. His previous final was in Cordoba, where he lost to the 19-year-old southpaw Juan Manuel Cerundolo.
Our second number is 32, Petra Kvitova’s career main-draw win total in Madrid. The Czech’s boom-or-bust game style is better associated with grass courts, where she has won two major titles, but the moderate altitude and quick clay in Madrid seems to be the next-best thing. Kvitova won the title here in 2011, 2015, and 2018, and owns a 5-3 record against the top ten at the event, including upsets of Serena Williams, Victoria Azarenka, and Li Na. The six-foot lefty faced her first test of this year’s tournament yesterday, coming through against Veronika Kudermetova in three sets to earn a place in the quarter-finals and chance for another Madrid upset against world #1 Ashleigh Barty. The two slam winners have played nine times, but none of their previous meetings seem particularly relevant: eight are on hard courts, and the ninth was in 2012, when Barty was still dreaming of a career in professional cricket. The Australian is now the better player, regardless of surface, and the Tennis Abstract forecast gives her a 65% edge tomorrow. Yet Madrid has always been the least dirtbally of the big European clay stops, a quirkiness that seems to play right into Petra’s strengths.
Today’s third and final number is 6, the number of tiebreaks played by Marcos Giron in the last week. Giron, a 27-year-old American ranked 91st in the world, has been the hardest working man on the Iberian peninsula over the last seven days, with three matches in Estoril and Madrid running over the three-hour mark, and a fourth lasting two hours before Yoshi Nishioka retired at the start of a third set. Yesterday’s match against Pablo Andujar was the longest of the bunch, at three hours, 21 minutes, and it illustrates the most impressive aspect of Giron’s run. A man with little experience on European clay is keeping up with guys like Andujar, Corentin Moutet, and Thiago Monteiro who know it well. The American’s margins are small, as is clear from yesterday’s 6-7, 7-6, 7-5 scoreline, but expectations are low: Any U.S. player gets automatic respect for showing up to a non-mandatory clay-court event, and Giron’s three wins in Madrid already set a high bar for other American aspirants to clear. Anything he does in the next round is gravy, which is for the best, since he’ll go head-to-head with two-time French Open runner-up Dominic Thiem.
