Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: P3tra comes back for a roller-coaster battle with Magda Linette, American men have faded even on hard courts, Serena Williams looks ahead to an opponent with clay-court experience.
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 66%, the rate at which Petra Kvitova won points yesterday after losing a 6-1 opening set in Rome to Magda Linette. The 1-6, 6-0, 6-2 advance was an unusually scenic route for the free-swinging lefty, who played her third consecutive three-setter, and her 5th in 8 matches this year on red clay. Back in 2013, internet wags flipped the “e” in Petra for a 3, misspelling her name to highlight her predilection for making things complicated. She spent that entire year ranked in the top ten, winning 51 of 74 matches, 37 of her contests going the distance. That’s an even 50%, unusual territory for a top player over a full schedule. It proved an aberration—since then, a more typical one-third of her matches have required three sets. But yesterday’s victory against Linette makes 9 three-setters in her last 21 outings, a sign that the Czech is once again taking things at her own pace. For opponents, it’s a reminder that a lopsided first set is hardly a guarantee of an easy day at the office. For fans, it hearkens back to time when P3tra’s matches were among the most entertaining on tour.
Our second number is zero, the number of American men in the top 30 of my latest hard-court Elo rankings. The mainstream news is that, for the first time, the US has no representatives in the ATP top 30. This analytical version is even worse: Virtually all American men prefer hard courts, but they don’t even stand out on their preferred surface. Fortunately for fans of the stars and stripes, help is on the way, and soon. Four men under the age of 21 rank in the Elo top 50: Jannik Sinner, Felix Auger Aliassime, Jenson Brooksby, and Sebastian Korda. The last two are Americans, and while they are the least accomplished of the quartet and Brooksby has barely played above Challenger level, the two 20-year-old Americans are poised to break through. The most likely 2020s parallel of Sampras and Agassi might be Russian, but even if the once-promising generation of Taylor Fritz, Frances Tiafoe, and Reilly Opelka fails to deliver a superstar, American tournaments will soon have new crop of top-tier US men to count on.
Today’s third and final number is 210, Serena Williams’s career matches played on clay courts. She’s won 175 of them, including 13 titles, yet another entry in the American’s book-length list of accomplishments. But Serena has long been choosy with her schedule, and with her preference for faster surfaces, she has relegated clay to fewer than 10 matches per season. After a first-round bye, she’ll kick off her 2021 clay season in Rome this week, with an opening match against either Laura Siegemund or Nadia Podoroska, who face off today. Siegemund is seven years younger than Williams, yet she prefers the dirt, and has played more than twice as many professional clay-court matches as her potential second-round opponent. Podoroska, a 24-year-old Argentine most fans hadn’t heard of before her surprise run to last year’s French Open semis, has played over 250 clay-court matches, more than Serena despite the 15-year age gap. Whoever advances will put their faith in surface-specific experience and hope for a bit of rustiness from the American, but according to the Tennis Abstract Elo forecast, Williams remains the favorite, with a 59% chance of reaching the round of 16.
