Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: The draw has become much more inviting for the underrated Kudermetova, Andrey Rublev suffers another clay-court loss he barely deserved, and Aleksandra Krunic forces Coco Gauff to play marathon set.
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 4.5%, the chance the Veronika Kudermetova will win the French Open, according to the Tennis Abstract forecast. A probability of 4.5% makes Kudermetova the second favorite in the bottom half of the draw to Aryna Sabalenka, and the fifth favorite overall, narrowly behind Elina Svitolina. Much of Kudermetova’s status owes to the early withdrawals of Naomi Osaka and Petra Kvitova, and is further aided by the loss of Bianca Andreescu, who could’ve been Kudermetova’s 3rd-round opponent. But the 24-year-old Russian deserves some of the credit herself. Kudermetova is the 29th seed, which underrates her performance this year. She reached the final in Abu Dhabi, won in Charleston, and her only losses on clay thus far have been to Kvitova, Elise Mertens, and Ashleigh Barty. My single-season Elo metric rates her 6th best on tour this year, bad news for Kudermetova’s 2nd-round opponent today, Katerina Siniakova.
Our second number comes from my friend Carl Bialik, host of the Thirty-Love podcast. The number is 1.02, Andrey Rublev’s dominance ratio in his five clay-court losses this season. Dominance ratio is a stat invented by Carl that expresses a player’s success rate as a ratio of return points won to opponent’s return points won. Higher than 1 is usually associated with a win. In yesterday’s five-set loss to Jan Lennard Struff, Rublev won exactly half of the 340 points, and recorded a dominance ratio of 1.06. Combined with his Rome defeat to Lorenzo Sonego and his Madrid exit at the hands of John Isner, that makes three losses in a row in which Rublev won more return points than his opponent did, yet lost the match. After the Russian’s upset of Rafael Nadal and subsequent 2nd-place finish in Monte Carlo, Rublev has failed to establish himself as a leader on clay. He didn’t reach another semi-final, and has still only won a single French Open first-round match. But the point totals tell us that Rublev was extremely close to some better results this year.
Today’s third and final number is 135, the number of points in the first set of last night’s Coco Gauff-Aleksandra Krunic match. In an unexpected highlight of the first round, the diminutive Serbian qualifier Krunic gave as good as she got against Gauff, the 17-year-old starlet who won in Parma two weeks ago. The American teenager ultimately snuck through, 7-6, 6-4, going all the way to 13-11 to win the first-set tiebreak. In 2019, the last full season of the WTA tour, barely half of matches required 135 points or more, while this one needed that many just for Gauff to put the first set on the board. For Krunic, yesterday’s nailbiter was the latest in a long line of near-misses. It extended her grand slam losing streak to four, a run going back to the 2019 French Open, when she lost 11-9 in the third set to Lesia Tsurenko. Three years removed from her peak ranking of #39, Krunic is unlikely to repeat her career highlight of a fourth-round showing at the 2014 US Open. But she remains a name that no seed will want to face in the Wimbledon first round—especially if they want to get through quickly.
