Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Everything is going Karolina Pliskova’s way, Denis Kudla pushes his grass-court experience to the max, and Brengle finds a pair of opponents willing to beat themselves.
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 13, the WTA ranking of Karolina Pliskova. Pliskova is the 8th seed at Wimbledon, but for the first time since 2016, she enters a tournament with a ranking outside the top 10. But based on her early results at the All England Club, she may regain a single-digit ranking quickly. After a first-round win over French Open semi-finalist Tamara Zidansek, Pliskova whipped past Donna Vekic, 6-2 6-2 in 68 minutes. The best news for the Czech was what happened in the other matches in her section. The draw lined her up for a potential fourth-round match with Jessica Pegula, the American who has beaten her four times this season, three of them handily. But Berlin champion Liudmila Samsonova earned herself a place on Pliskova’s Christmas card list by ousting Pegula. The coast is hardly clear, with Samsonova and Sloane Stephens in her section, but should Pliskova keep winning, she won’t face a seed until the quarter-finals, and she’ll be the higher-ranked player until at least the semi-finals. With a stature and a serve built for grass, Pliskova can’t afford to miss this opportunity to turn things around.
Our second number is 71, Denis Kudla’s career win total on grass. For a player who has spent much of his career on the fringes of the top 100, amassing so much experience on turf indicates quite a commitment. Kudla is a 28-year-old American, and he has played 11 grass-court challengers and entered another 15 tour-level qualifying draws since his first appearance as a 17-year-old at Den Bosch in 2010. He advanced through Wimbledon qualifying last week at Roehampton and has kept the momentum going. He kicked off his main-draw campaign with a five-set upset of 30th-seed Alejandro Davidovich Fokina, and took it relatively easy yesterday with a straight-set, 91-minute defeat of Andreas Seppi. It’s not his best showing at Wimbledon, having reached the fourth round in 2015, and unfortunately, it’s likely to stop tomorrow. His reward for the Seppi win is a third-round date with Novak Djokovic, the same man who stopped him in the second round at Wimbledon in 2019. Since dropping the first set of the tournament on Monday to British wild card Jack Draper, Djokovic has cruised. Alas, no amount of experience would get Kudla over this next hump.
Today’s third and final number is 117, the number of unforced errors committed by Madison Brengle’s two opponents at Wimbledon this week. Brengle is possibly the most passive player in all of women’s tennis. The Aggression Score metric, devised by Lowell West, calculates what fraction of a player’s shots end the point, for good or bad. 0 is average, and the most extreme players are around positive and negative 100. In 16 matches logged by the Match Charting Project, Brengle’s Aggression Score is negative 141. She battled past Christina McHale in the first round, hitting 13 winners and 26 unforced to McHale’s 57 and 71. Yesterday she overcame Sofia Kenin in straights, hitting only 6 winners and 7 unforced errors, while Kenin hit 20 and 41. Brengle’s career-best ranking is 35th, and she has spent more time in the vicinity of her current position in the 80s. But when an opponent is having a bad day, she’s wait… and wait… and wait for her to hand over the match. While Brengle will be the underdog in every match she plays, there’s no shortage of players on tour with the ability to beat themselves.
