Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Clara Tauson scores a breakthrough victory in Lyon, Alexander Bublik sets a new standard for hopeless returning in Singapore, and Djokovic topples another one of Roger Federer’s all-time records.
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 15, Clara Tauson’s win total already in 2021. The 18-year-old from Denmark recorded one of the best wins of her young career yesterday, ousting top seed Ekaterina Alexandrova in the opening round of the WTA International event in Lyon. It was only Tauson’s second match versus a top-40 player, and she’s undefeated against them, having knocked out Jennifer Brady in a three-hour battle at Roland Garros last fall. Playing primarily at the ITF W25 level, the Dane has been one of the strongest players on the minor league circuit. She won a title in Fujairah in January and another two weeks ago in Altenkirchen. Combined with two victories in Lyon qualifying, she’ll carry an eight-match win streak into her second-round match with Timea Babos. Despite her youth and modest WTA ranking of 139, Tennis Abstract Elo ratings peg her as a narrow favorite against the veteran Hungarian.
Our second number is 6. 6 is the number of return points Alexander Bublik won in the Singapore final on Sunday, his fourth failed attempt to win a championship match at tour level. Claiming only six points on return is dismal, but not exceedingly rare; the weird part about the Kazakh’s performance was that he bunched four of those points together and broke serve. That was enough to snatch the first set from Alexei Popyrin, though it was far from sufficient to keep Popyrin from his own first title. In the 30-year history of ATP match stats, only seven other players won six or fewer return points and still managed to break serve, and none of them leveraged that advantage into an entire set. Amazingly though, it is possible to be so helpless on return and still win a match, as Reilly Opelka proved two years ago in Basel. Cristian Garin held him to only six return points, but Opelka timed them well, was typically unhittable on his own serve, and won the match with a pair of tiebreaks. Bublik may need to follow Opelka’s example to finally win his first ATP title.
Today’s third and final number is 310, Novak Djokovic’s career tally of weeks at number one. It’s the latest of Roger Federer’s towering records to fall to a rival, though for six more days, Djokovic and Federer will be tied at the top of the list. Novak’s 2,000-point lead in the rankings list ensures he’ll not only break the all-time record next Monday, but that he’ll open up a bit of a gap in the coming weeks. Fed fans wishing for a branch to cling to can look to the record for consecutive weeks in the top spot, which is still Roger’s. Federer sat at the top of the table for 237 straight weeks, from February 2004 to August 2008, while Djokovic’s best run was 122 weeks, between 2014 and 2016. The Serbian’s current streak, excluding the tour’s suspension for the pandemic last year, is a more modest 29 weeks. After his pummeling of Daniil Medvedev in the Australian Open final, it’s hard to see Djokovic giving up the number one position anytime soon, but another 200-plus weeks is a big ask for the 33-year-old. No single contender for the greatest-of-all-time designation will be able to finish his career atop all of tennis’s many measures of dominance.