Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Schwartzman is once again negating the server advantage, Elena Rybakina beat Serena by playing like Serena, and Daniil Medvedev aims to remain unbeaten in clay-court quarter-finals.
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 28, Diego Schwartzman’s breaks of serve in his four French Open matches so far. That’s more than two per set, including 8 against the big-serving Jan Lennard Struff yesterday. Schwartzman had struggled since reached the final four in Paris last fall and carried a four-match losing streak into Roland Garros last week. But thanks to a soft draw and perhaps some good memories, El Peque has won 12 straight sets to earn a rematch of last year’s semifinal with Rafael Nadal. He’s gotten this far by reviving his brilliant returning form, an aspect of his game that eluded him for much of the European clay season. In five losses in the last two months, he never won more than 37% of return points, hitting a nadir of 22% against Casper Ruud in Monte Carlo. At the French so far, he’s won 51% of his opponents’ serve points, including 47% yesterday against Struff. It’s hard to imagine Schwartzman surprising Nadal tomorrow, as Rafa leads the head-to-head 10 to 1, including a straight-setter in Paris eight months ago. But Diego looks to stand a much better chance than he would have just a few weeks ago.
Our second number is 40%, the rate at which Elena Rybakina’s first serves didn’t come back on Sunday in her fourth-round match against Serena Williams. Serena was a longshot to win her 24th grand slam at Roland Garros, but few observers pegged Rybakina as the one to beat her. The 21-year-old representing Kazakhstan turned Serena’s game plan against her, serving big, hitting forehand winners when the serves dared to come back, and shrugging off the inevitable errors. Rybakina’s average first serve was harder than Williams’s, and she hit more winners. The key was finishing so many points before they started. According to Match Charting Project data, the average tour player’s first serves are unreturned less than 20% of the time on clay, and while Rybakina has occasionally approached 50% unreturned on hard court, she’s sometimes below tour average on a slow surface. In the quarters today, Rybakina faces Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova. Pavs is surely relieved to avoid Williams, who has beaten her in all six of their meetings. But the relief may not last, as this week, Rybakina is playing a bit like Serena herself.
Today’s third and final number is 100%, Daniil Medvedev’s winning percentage in clay-court quarter-finals. Medvedev finds himself in another one today as the underdog against fifth-seed Stefanos Tsitsipas, despite holding the #2 seed himself. Tsitsipas has excelled on the clay this season, winning Monte Carlo and nearly dethroning Rafael Nadal in Barcelona, while Medvedev’s spring highlights have largely consisted of off-the-cuff remarks about how much he hates the surface. Yet the Russian has dropped only one set in the first four rounds, breaking Reilly Opelka five times and easily dispatching Cristian Garin on Sunday. His career record on clay is a meager 15-20, but this isn’t his first streak. In 2019, he beat Tsitsipas and Novak Djokovic to reach the Monte Carlo semifinal, then backed it up with a runner-up showing the following week in Barcelona, reaching and winning the only two clay-court quarter-finals of his career. He’s barely won a match on the surface since, but Medvedev has the patience and creativity to excel on slow surfaces, even if the bounce doesn’t favor his flat groundstrokes. Today, fans will expect little from the Russian, but Tsitsipas surely knows better, having lost that single clay-court encounter against him.
