Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Schwartzman struggles on his favorite surface, Qiang Wang joins an exclusive club, and Pablo Andujar doesn’t discriminate based on age.
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 4 matches, the length of Diego Schwartzman’s current losing streak on clay. It’s his worst skid on his favorite surface since 2015, when he had yet to crack the top 60 in the ATP rankings, and it’s happening as he tries to hang on to a place in the top ten. The first three of the losses, against Pablo Carreno Busta, Aslan Karatsev, and Felix Auger Aliassime, are individually understandable: The Argentine himself noted that he was losing to good players. Yesterday’s defeat was less defensible, coming against Richard Gasquet, a 34-year-old struggling to find form after injury. Schwartzman’s top ten status is due to an impressive run last September, reaching the final in Rome and the semis at Roland Garros. Auger Aliassime stopped him from repeating the first, and an encore of the second is looking increasingly unlikely. Diego’s sole clay-court highlight this year was a title in front of the home crowd in Buenos Aires, which required only four wins, none of them against top-40 players. Even with the cushion of a top-10 seed, it’ll take a lot more than that to go deep in Paris.
Our second number is 25, the number of WTA clay-court semi-finals reached by Chinese players. 29-year-old Qiang Wang reached her first final four on the surface in Parma by upsetting Petra Martic yesterday, becoming only the 7th Chinese woman to accomplish the feat. 17 of the previous 24 are thanks to Li Na and Peng Shuai, while Li Fang was the first to break the barrier, winning quarter-finals in Makarska and Budapest in back-to-back weeks in 1998. The trivia might give Wang a bit to brag about, but the more important story is her inexplicable dominance of Martic, a player who reached the Rome semi-final last week and has a vastly superior clay-court record. Wang has lost more career clay matches than she’s won, hoping for her 20th career victory on the surface against Sloane Stephens today. Yet the three-hour battle against Martic yesterday was Wang’s second career clay win over the Croatian, having beaten her one-and-one at Roland Garros three years ago. The Chinese woman has scuffled since returning to the tour in January, watching her ranking drop from 34th to 48th, far off her career high of #12. While fans had little reason to expect much on the European clay, Wang’s momentum has already changed direction.
Today’s third and final number is 21 years, the age difference between Roger Federer and Dominic Stricker. You might think of them as the present and future of Swiss tennis, but for Pablo Andujar this week, they were mere stepping stones to his first tour-level semi-final since 2019. By beating both of them, the Spaniard became the first player since 1992 to record defeats against players so far apart in age. In Tel Aviv that year, Gilad Bloom knocked out 40-year-old Jimmy Connors and 18-year-old Alex Corretja, an impressive run regardless of their ages. In the last decade, the biggest age gap between victims of the same player at the same tournament was 20 years and 3 months, when Ivo Karlovic and Alejandro Davidovich Fokina lost to the same player at the 2019 French Open. The man who beat them was Jordan Thompson—fittingly enough, Andujar’s first-round opponent this week in Geneva.
