Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Karatsev outhits the field to win the Dubai title and improve his record on the season to 15-2, Daria Kasatkina is combining small-scale comebacks into a bigger one, and the Miami field will be just fine, if a little less glamorous than usual.
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 81, the number of groundstroke and net winners hit by Aslan Karatsev in his final three matches en route to the Dubai title. Some context helps: his opponents in those matches combined for only 18, and those men, Jannik Sinner, Andrey Rublev, and Lloyd Harris, are hardly shrinking violets on the court. Per @AnnaK_4ever on twitter, Karatsev hit more that combined total in the final against Harris alone. The Russian’s aggressive game has given him a 15-2 record to start the season, following up his Australian Open semi-final run with his first tour-level title. His ranking, outside the top 250 when the tour restarted in August, is up to 27. With two top-ten wins and his only losses coming against top-five players, Elo likes him even more, ranking him 14th, ahead of the likes of Denis Shapovalov and Roberto Bautista Agut. Karatsev won’t continue to win 88% of his matches, nor will he always hit four times the groundstroke winners of his opponents, but it’s clear that the Russian’s Melbourne heroics were no fluke.
Our second number is 5, the number of matches this season in which Daria Kasatkina has come back from a one-set deficit to win. She’s dropped the first set only 9 times, and a winning record from that position is particularly impressive. All five of the come-from-behind victories have been part of her two title runs, first at the Melbourne consolation event, the Phillip Island Trophy, where she dug out from a 4-6 first set against Marie Bouzkova in the championship match. The roller coaster ride continued in St Petersburg last week, with consecutive comebacks against Aliaksandra Sasnovich, Veronika Kudermetova, and Svetlana Kuznetsova, the last two of which involved bouncing back from losing 6-1 opening frames. Regardless of the roundabout paths to victory, Kasatkina’s resurgence is long-awaited. She cracked the top ten as a 21-year-old in 2018, but fell as low as 75th in the rankings last month. The two titles catapult back up to #42, with her favorite surface of clay just around the corner.
Today’s third and final number is 68, the number of ATP top 100 players currently planning on taking part in the Miami Open, which starts this week. Recent news has brought a constant string of withdrawals, including Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, and Roger Federer, leaving only half of the top ten in the draw. I’m choosing to take a glass-half-full attitude here, since 68 of the world’s best players could be seen as a coup for a tournament that ended up with a tricky geographic and scheduling position amid the pandemic. Miami is usually the second half of the sunshine double and a mandatory stop for all players with rankings high enough to qualify, but with no Indian Wells this month and relaxed entry rules, players who spent the last two weeks in the Middle East would be making a dedicated trip to Florida before returning to Europe for the clay season. The event will still feature two weeks of great tennis, as Serena Williams is the only high-profile woman to pull out, and the men’s draw will feature recent titlists Alexander Zverev and Aslan Karatsev, along with a slew of exciting prospects.
