Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: A round-of-32 match in Lyon sets a high standard of quality, Katerina Siniakova reminds us she can be dangerous once every year or two, and a small army of qualifiers make a mess of the draw in Belgrade.
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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 1939, Aslan Karatsev’s Tennis Abstract Elo rating entering this week. While he’s ranked 25th on the ATP computer, the Elo algorithm considers him the 11th best player in men’s tennis right now. Despite that, he’s the underdog in his first-round match in Lyon today against Jannik Sinner, another man the advanced metric rates more highly than the traditional tally. Sinner is 17th on the official list and 8th overall by Elo. An opening-round clash between two players such a high level is rare at any tournament, and it almost never happens in an ATP 250. Since the current tour structure began in 2008, only two round-of-32 matches have featured an underdog rated more highly than Karatsev: Grigor Dimitrov against Gilles Simon in Brisbane in 2016, and Milos Raonic versus Gael Monfils in 2013 in Halle. We need to go back to 1994 to find a comparable clay-court match, when Sergi Bruguera took on Pat Rafter in Gstaad. Whoever wins will quickly return to more typical 250-level programming, facing the winner of a match between qualifier Mikael Ymer and lucky loser Arthur Rinderknech, two players ranked outside the top 100.
Our second number is 6, Katerina Siniakova’s career top-ten win total. Her latest scalp came yesterday, when she straight-setted a rusty Serena Williams to advance to the final eight in Parma. The Czech, who turned 25 last week, has never fulfilled her early singles promise, but she is occasionally a thorn in the side of the very players. Her last top-ten win was an upset of top seed Naomi Osaka at the 2019 French Open, and in 2017, she defeated both Simona Halep and Caroline Wozniacki, the latter victory completing a title run in Bastad, where she beat three straight top-20 opponents. Six top-tenners is an impressive haul for a player who has never reached #30 in the rankings, especially compared to the rest of her recent record. In the almost two-year span between the Osaka and Williams upsets, she lost all nine of her matches against top-20 foes, and tallied only 10 wins against women in the top 50. Fortunately for Siniakova, she’s more successful in other pursuits. A former world #1 in doubles, she has two grand slams to her name. She’s skipping the doubles this week, looking ahead to a possible quarter-final with Caroline Garcia, another player counted among the Czech’s top-10 victories.
Today’s third and final number is 5, the number of qualifiers who won their first-round matches at the new WTA event in Belgrade this week. Six qualifiers earned a place in the main draw, and all but one continued their winning ways in the first round, two of them upsetting seeded players and four of them fighting through three sets. The biggest upset belonged to 23-year Moldovan Cristina Bucsa, who knocked out 8th-seed Danka Kovinic in just her third shot at a WTA main draw. Bucsa’s next challenge is Aliaksandra Sasnovich, the one player to defeat a qualifier yesterday. At least one of the upstarts will reach the quarter-finals, as Serbian fans will be treated today to a contest between 19-year-old prospects, Russian Kamilla Rakhimova and Colombian Maria Camila Osorio Serrano. The Colombian won a tour-level title in Bogota last month, while Rakhimova is only two weeks removed from a career-best result at the ITF 60K in Zagreb. If the next phase of the draw goes according to the script, the winner of that match will be the third straight qualifier to challenge Aliaksandra Sasnovich.
