Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Serena advances past a pair of Romanians, a bunch of North American men survive to see the third round, and the era of the Four Musketeers winds down.
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 89%, Serena Williams’s career winning percentage against Romanians. Her 24th and 25th wins in 28 matches against Romania have kicked off her French Open campaign, as she beat Irina Camelia Begu on Monday and battled through a three-setter against lefty Mihaela Buzarnescu last night. If Serena is to face a third Romanian, it will be good news indeed: the only remaining possibilities are Sorana Cirstea and Ana Bogdan, neither of whom she could meet before the semi-final. Williams fans could be forgiven for getting nervous at the sight of the Romanian tri-color, as two of Serena’s matches against Simona Halep were among the most lopsided defeats of her career. Apart from Halep, who is sitting out this year’s French with an injury, Serena has been perfect against Romanians for more than 22 years. In 1998, a 16-year-old Williams suffered her first-ever loss at the US Open to Irina Spirlea. But even as a teenager, Serena settled her debts. She straight-setted Spirlea in Rome the following year, and when the Romanian retired in 2000, it was Williams who led the head-to-head, 3 matches to 1.
Our second number is 0.2%, the approximate chance that a North American man will win the French Open this year. 1 in 500 sounds like long odds, and it is, but compared to ever-dropping expectations, the first four days at Roland Garros have been filled with positive news for players representing the USA. Six of them were on court yesterday, with four wins, thanks to John Isner, Steve Johnson, Reilly Opelka, and Marcos Giron. Johnson won back-to-back matches against top-100 players for the first time since August 2019, Giron overcame Argentina’s Guido Pella to reach his first-ever grand slam third round, and Opelka somehow got past Jaume Munar without playing a single tiebreak. Even Mackenzie McDonald, one of the USA’s two losers yesterday, fought 22nd seed Cristian Garin to 6-6 in the fifth set. 30th seed Taylor Fritz has his second-round match today, and will try to bring the North American total to five of the final 32. None of yesterday’s victors have even a one-in-three chance of winning another round, but for a country known for ineffectiveness on clay and recently setting records for its low position in the rankings, simply hanging around this long is cause for celebration.
Today’s third and final number is 2010, the combined career win total of Frenchmen Richard Gasquet, Gael Monfils, Gilles Simon, and Jo Wilfried Tsonga. The so-called Four Musketeers were once touted as the greatest generation of French men’s tennis players, and while they didn’t quite reach that lofty goal, they kept Les Bleus near the top of the international tennis heap for over a decade. All four are in their mid-thirties, each one has missed substantial time with various injuries, and only Monfils remains among the top four Frenchman on the ATP computer. Even he is playing like a man on the brink of retirement, with 10 losses in his last 12 matches and a ranking entirely dependent on hot streak last February. Of the quartet, only Gasquet and Monfils survived to the second round at Roland Garros, and both are on court today. Monfils stands a good chance at a third-round berth, facing Mikael Ymer. Gasquet, on the other hand, gets his nearly-annual date with Rafael Nadal. It turned out that nobody beat Vitas Gerulaitis 17 times in a row, but with the tour-level Gasquet-Nadal head-to-head standing at 0-16, the smooth-swinging Frenchman won’t be able to say the same thing as he creeps closer to retirement.
