Clara Tauson picked up her third career title in Auckland on Sunday. She claimed the trophy after losing the first set when her opponent, Naomi Osaka, retired with an abdominal injury. It isn’t the way she would have liked to have won it, and based on the first 45 minutes of play, she probably wouldn’t have beaten a healthy Osaka. But she earned her spot in the championship match, ousting top-seeded Madison Keys in the quarter-finals.
It was a long wait for the 22-year-old from Denmark. She won two titles and reached a third final in 2021, ultimately climbing to a peak rank of 33 in early 2022. Back and foot injuries derailed her progress, and she languished outside the top 50 for more than two years. Once one of the game’s leading prospects, she still has plenty left to prove.
Tauson’s signature is what tennis people call easy power. She whips through the ball, especially on the forehand, with such impeccable technique that her strokes shoot through the court faster than it looks like they ought to. The Kiwi crowd saw an excellent display of easy power on Sunday, as Osaka possesses the same magic to an even greater extent. Both players hit angled bullets that made their opponent look lazy. But there’s little point in chasing a well-placed groundstroke off the Tauson (or Osaka) racket.
The Dane is nearly as effective from the service line. Standing six feet tall with excellent control, she can break a returner’s spirit with one ball after another on the center line. On Sunday, she served three consecutive down-the-tee aces against Osaka. A fully fit opponent might have gotten a racket on one or two of them, but only a handful of women could have put them back in play. In the last 52 weeks, only Osaka, Qinwen Zheng, and Elena Rybakina have hit aces at a better clip.
The challenge for Tauson is, well, everything else. While her backhand sometimes looks strong, the results on that wing are middling. Her second serve does not befit a six-footer. Most problematic of all, she doesn’t defend well. She piles up plenty of winners, but the women across the net hit more.
Winners take it all
It’s tempting to say that Clara’s big-swinging game is in the high-risk, high-reward Kvitova/Ostapenko/Alexandrova mold. (Okay, no one could ever be like Jelena Ostapenko, but you know what I mean.) It’s easy to picture her smacking a forehand winner or sending a groundstroke wildly astray.
The numbers, however, don’t bear it out. My go-to metric for WTA game style is Aggression Score, which tells us how often–on a per-shot basis–a player ends the point for good or ill. Tauson comes in at +18, more aggressive than average, but barely. (Average is zero, with most players falling between -100 and +100.) That’s only marginally ahead of Jasmine Paolini (+10), in a different territory entirely from Osaka (+108) or Ostapenko (+251) over the last year.
We gain some insight by breaking that number down into its components. The 22-year-old scores often enough on her favorite wing, ending points with a winner (or forced error) with nearly one in five forehands she hits. Over the last 52 weeks, that’s good for 13th out of 75 women for whom we have sufficient data:
Player FH Wnr% Jelena Ostapenko 33.1% Naomi Osaka 24.8% Lulu Sun 22.2% Aryna Sabalenka 22.0% Ekaterina Alexandrova 21.6% Amanda Anisimova 20.8% Katie Boulter 20.5% Diana Shnaider 20.4% Danielle Collins 20.4% Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova 20.3% Donna Vekic 20.1% Liudmila Samsonova 19.6% Clara Tauson 19.4%
She’s barely above average, however, by the backhand version of the same metric. Many of the women near the top of the forehand list take the same tactical approach off both sides. Ostapenko, Sabalenka, and Anisimova (among others) appear in the top ten by backhand winner rate, as well. Tauson, on the other hand, puts away backhands about as often as Bianca Andreescu or Jessica Pegula.
On the positive side, the Dane’s Aggression Score lags because she doesn’t hit a huge number of unforced errors. She takes more risks than the average WTAer on forehand–13% UFEs versus 11% for the tour as a whole–but fewer on the backhand–9% against 10%. Anisimova, by comparison, hits unforced errors on 14% of her forehands and 13% of her backhands.
Fewer errors is better, all else equal. But when Tauson works the point, her opponents tend to reap the rewards. She is much more successful in short points than long ones: Only a handful of players win fewer points in the 7- to 9-shot category. Prolonging the point has only so much value when you’re unlikely to win it. For someone with the 22-year-old’s skillset, better to swing away, accept more errors, and pick up that many more quick winners in exchange.
Flat-footed
The best illustration of what happens to Tauson in those (relatively) long points is the rate at which players hit winners against her. On average, about 29% of points end with a clean winner by either player, so the typical woman sees a winner fly by about 14.5% of the time. The Dane is near the top of the list:
Player vs Wnr/Pt Angelique Kerber 22.5% Clara Tauson 21.0% Marie Bouzkova 20.9% Emma Raducanu 19.8% Elise Mertens 19.3% Caroline Wozniacki 18.8% Daria Kasatkina 18.6% Victoria Azarenka 18.2% Yulia Putintseva 18.2% Elina Avanesyan 18.0%
This isn’t bad company, exactly. But for a free-swinging forehand expert, it’s the wrong crowd. With the possible exception of Raducanu, these are players who cough up winners because they try to build points and sometimes fail. (Or in some of these cases, opponents feast on weak second–or even first–serves.)
The biggest hitters generally allow their opponents fewer winners than average, even if they aren’t the best movers or their defensive rally skills are subpar. Here are the tour’s top ten in winners per point over the last year. I’ve shown their winners against (vs Wnr/Pt) as well, and added Tauson to the list for comparison:
Player Wnr/Pt vs Wnr/Pt Jelena Ostapenko 21.6% 11.5% Aryna Sabalenka 20.7% 12.0% Naomi Osaka 20.1% 14.8% Lulu Sun 20.1% 13.5% Elena Rybakina 19.1% 13.4% Ekaterina Alexandrova 19.1% 13.2% Ons Jabeur 18.9% 11.5% Danielle Collins 18.5% 13.1% Leylah Fernandez 18.2% 13.5% Donna Vekic 18.0% 15.5% … Clara Tauson 15.7% 21.0%
Of the top ten, only Osaka (barely) and Vekic allow more winners than average against them. None is even close to the previous list. One of the main benefits of an aggressive game style is that it takes the racket out of the other woman’s hand, even at the cost of some mishit service returns and wild groundstroke misses. Tauson, so far, has been unwilling to make that trade. It’s unclear whether she has the ability to post consistent wins with her more conservative approach.
Take the gamble
The Dane has some room to build on her current WTA rank of 41, but without unleashing more of her weapons, more of the time, I suspect she’ll get stuck on the wrong side of the top 20. Even if she can’t match the all-around barrage of someone like Sabalenka, she’d do better to follow that example than let herself turn into the next Elise Mertens.
In the 30 Tauson matches logged by the Match Charting Project, her Aggression Score in losses was +16. In victories, it was +36. (I grouped the Auckland final with the losses.) That’s not a slam-dunk case, especially since it lumps together matches from 2019 to today. But it hints that the 22-year-old plays better when she goes bigger.
One counter-example to that trend is instructive. Last week’s quarter-final against Keys was an unusually passive victory: Tauson won in straights despite an Aggression Score of -38. The American was more likely to seize the initiative, hitting exactly twice as many winners (and twice as many unforced errors) as the Dane. Tauson’s salvation was that Keys couldn’t do much against second serves. Keys won a dire 32% of second-serve return points–worse than she did against the Tauson first serve, and enough of a liability to swing the match in her opponent’s favor.
That kind of rescue is something that Clara rarely enjoys. Among the WTA top 50, she ranks 14th by first-serve win percentage. By second-serve win percentage, though, she’s fifth from the bottom. The percentage-point difference between her two numbers ranks with the biggest gaps on tour:
Player 1st% 2nd% Diff Qinwen Zheng 75.5% 46.8% 28.7% Coco Gauff 71.7% 43.8% 27.9% Ekaterina Alexandrova 69.5% 42.6% 26.9% Katie Boulter 70.8% 45.1% 25.7% Clara Tauson 69.2% 43.5% 25.7% Donna Vekic 70.7% 45.4% 25.3% Danielle Collins 70.5% 45.8% 24.7% Karolina Pliskova 67.4% 42.8% 24.6% Elena Rybakina 72.0% 48.6% 23.4% Naomi Osaka 74.5% 51.6% 22.9%
Qinwen is known for the disconnect between her two deliveries; Gauff spent much of the 2024 season struggling with double faults. More to the point, most of this group cleans up on first serve. Sure, Zheng or Rybakina would love to win more second-serve points, but their first-serve win rates are so high that it hardly holds them back.
Tauson’s first-serve success–even though it pales against that mostly-elite group–implies that she should be able to muster something better off the second delivery. She could take more chances: While her double-fault rate is above average, it is not worryingly high. More likely, she could use her height to push returners wide, then attempt to finish the job on the next shot. She shows us textbook examples of that play in almost every match, just not often enough.
The Dane has physical tools that will take her far in pro tennis. She’s doesn’t, however, have such extravagant gifts that she can get away with suboptimal tactics. Even in the tall-women’s club of the WTA, there aren’t many six-footers. It’s time that Tauson plays like one.
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Thank you very much for sending me your researches.
You are doing a great job!!!
Warm regards,
Daniel
Excellent stuff, mate!