Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: We’ll soon get a look at how 39-year-old Federer stacks up against veterans of the past, Coco Gauff is learning to love third sets, and Aryna Sabalenka joins an extremely crowded list of active doubles number ones.
Scroll down for a transcript.
You can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and elsewhere in the podcast universe.
Music: Love is the Chase by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2021. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: Apoxode
The Expected Points podcast is still a work in progress, so please let me know what you think.
Rough transcript of today’s episode:
The first number is 405, the number of days since Roger Federer last played a competitive match. Expected Points tries to go beyond the headline stories, but I could hardly skip mentioning Fed’s return to action 14 months after the 2020 Australian Open semifinal. In his first match back in Doha, he’ll play sometime practice partner Dan Evans, a fellow one-handed backhander who beat Jeremy Chardy yesterday. The Swiss #6 is 3-0 in his career against the Brit, including a meeting a previous comeback tournament at the 2019 Australian Open, but there’s no guarantee this will be an easy ticket for Roger to punch. The 20-time slam winner is 39 years old, almost uncharted territory for elite singles players. Only 50 men in the entire Open Era have won a singles match after their 39th birthdays, and a mere handful of those, including Tommy Haas, Feliciano Lopez, and Ivo Karlovic, have done so since the mid 90s retirement of Jimmy Connors. If Federer is looking for inspiration—or, perhaps, a new record to target—he can consider Ken Rosewall, who kept rolling after his 39th birthday, winning another 170-plus matches before finally calling it quits seven years later.
Our second number is 7, the number of consecutive three-set matches played by 16-year-old American Coco Gauff. Gauff’s streak began in Adelaide qualifying a couple of weeks ago, when she beat Kaja Juvan from one set down. It took another three-set effort from Belinda Bencic to finally eliminate her from that tournament in the semifinals. Now in Dubai, Gauff has continued her warrior ways, with deciding-set upset wins over Ekaterina Alexandrova and Marketa Vondrousova. She saved match points in the Alexandrova match, and she withstood a Vondrousova serving tic she found annoying to improve her career three-set record to 20-12. Winning so many deciding sets is a bit of a mixed signal: clearly it’s better than losing them, but better still would be to win in straights. If she’s going to record a win more efficiently, she couldn’t ask for a better third-round opponent than her next assignment Tereza Martincova, a 26-year-old Czech qualifier ranked outside the top 100. If she goes three today, we’ll have wonder whether the teenager just prefers it that way.
Today’s third and final number is 19, the number of active women who have held the #1 WTA ranking in doubles. Aryna Sabalenka became the 19th a few weeks ago after she and Elise Mertens won the Australian Open. Only 44 women have held the top spot in the history of the rankings, in large part because Martina Navratilova monopolized the top of the list for more than four years, and the duo of Liezel Huber and Cara Black accounted for another seven years between them. Recent generations have seen plenty of standout doubles stars, such as Sania Mirza and Sara Errani, each of whom held onto the #1 ranking for 87 weeks or more, but it’s crowded at the top these days. Seven of the current top eight have been #1 at some point, leaving the door open for Mertens—currently ranked second—to add herself to the list. She can’t do it this week, as she’s pairing Sabalenka in Dubai, but with Sabalenka’s stated desire to focus on singles, the Belgian could soon have her chance.
