Italian translation at settesei.it
In yesterday’s French Open quarterfinals, Elina Svitolina held a commanding lead over Simona Halep, up a set and 5-1. Depending on what numbers you plug into the formula, Svitolina’s chance of winning the match at that stage was somewhere between 97% and 99%. Halep fought back to 5-5, and in the second-set tiebreak, Svitolina earned a match point at 6-5. Halep recovered again, won the breaker, and then cruised to a 6-0 victory in the third set.
It’s easy to fit a narrative to that sequence of events: After losing two leads, Svitolina was dispirited, and Halep was all but guaranteed a third-set victory. Maybe. It’s impossible to test that sort of thing on the evidence of a single match, but this is hardly the first time a player has failed to convert match point and needed to start fresh in a new set.
Even without a match point saved, the player who wins the second set has a small advantage going into the decider. In the last six-plus years of women’s Slam matches, the player who won the second set went on to win 51.3% of third sets. On the other hand, if the second set was a tiebreak, the winner of the second set won the decider only 43.7% of the time. Though it sounds contradictory at first, consider what we know about such sets. The second-set winner just barely claimed her set (in the tiebreak), while usually, her opponent took the first set more decisively. Momentum helps a little, but it can’t overcome much of a difference in skill level.
Let’s dig into the specific cases of second-set match points saved. Thanks to the data behind IBM’s Pointstream on Grand Slam websites, we have the point-by-point sequence for most Slam singles matches going back to 2011. (The missing matches are usually those on non-Hawkeye courts and a few small courts at Roland Garros.) That’s over 2,600 women’s singles matches. In just over 1,700 of them, one of the two players earned a match point in the second set. Over 97% of the time, that player converted–needing an average of 1.7 match points to do so–and avoiding playing a third set.
That leaves 45 matches in which one player held a match point in the second set, failed to finish the job, and was forced to play a third set. It’s a limited sample, and it doesn’t wholeheartedly support the third-set-collapse narrative suggested above. 60% of the time–27 of the 45 matches–the player who failed to convert match point in the second set, like Svitolina did, went on to lose the third set. The third set was often lopsided: 5 of the 27 were bagels (including yesterday’s match), and the average score was 6-2. None of the third sets went beyond 6-4.
The other 18 matches–the 40% of the time in which the player with the second-set match point bounced back to win the third set–featured rather one-way deciders, as well. In those, the third-set loser managed an average of only 2.3 games, also never doing better than 6-4.
This is a small sample, so it’s unwise to conclude that this 60/40 margin is anything close to an iron law of tennis. That said, it does provide some evidence that players don’t necessarily collapse after failing to convert a straight-sets win at match point. What happened to Svitolina yesterday is far from certain to happen next time.