Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Aslan Karatsev climbs another rung on the ladder, Rafael Nadal conquers Stefanos Tsitsipas—and yet another historic achievement, and Ashleigh Barty soaks up the power in an up-and-down final.
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 1216, the number of shots hit by Novak Djokovic and Aslan Karatsev in their Belgrade semi-final match on Saturday. A clay-court 250 in April is hardly the usual context for one of the best matches of the year, but every 2021 year-in-review will mention this one. Djokovic remains the best player in the world, and one of the best on clay, while Karatsev, a 27-year-old ranked outside the top 200 a year ago, has been the story of the ATP season. The Russian’s surprise success had entirely taken place on hard courts, including a semi-final run in Australia and a title in Dubai, and his style of hitting winners from anywhere, to anywhere, seems better suited to a faster surface. In 3 hours and 26 minutes, Karatsev proved otherwise and overcame the world #1, hitting 49 winners—more than twice as many as Djokovic—while demonstrating a patience that was rarely necessary in Melbourne. He fell just short in yesterday’s final, losing a third-set tiebreak to Matteo Berrettini, but as a whole, Karatsev’s week definitely goes down in the win column.
Our second number is 452, Rafael Nadal’s career victory total on clay. The 452nd was his answer to Djokovic’s marathon on Saturday, a 3 hour, 40 minute final against Stefanos Tsitsipas in yesterday’s Barcelona title match. The career tally isn’t just another big number to remind us how thoroughly Nadal has dominated his competition in April and May every year. 452 is one greater than the combined total of Djokovic and Roger Federer. Novak is the second-best clay-court player of their generation, and Fed has been at it for longer than either, so this is no mere trivia. Surpassing the duo was probably far from Rafa’s mind as he fought off 11 of Tsitsipas’s 13 break points yesterday, but fans will surely embrace the latest tidbit that illustrates the vast gap between the Spaniard and the pack. By the time he’s done, the only clay-court records Nadal won’t hold are the ones that modern tennis effectively blocks, like Guillermo Vilas’s 681 career wins on the surface. I’m not saying he couldn’t catch Vilas, just that he probably won’t stick around long enough to win Barcelona—as Tsitsipas joked in his runner-up speech—28 times.
Today’s third and final number is 1.1, Ashleigh Barty’s ratio of winners to unforced errors in her final-round victory in Stuttgart yesterday over Aryna Sabalenka. The scoreline of 3-6 6-0 6-3 makes the match sound scratchier than it was, though admittedly, the Belarussian was even more unstable than usual. The world #1 took her medicine in the opening set, watching Sabalenka’s winners go by, then reversed the momentum with a bagel set in which she hit 9 winners against only 3 unforced. The final set was the most closely fought, though it was never really in doubt after the Australian raced to a 3-0 lead. Skeptics of the notion that Barty is suddenly an elite-level clay player still have plenty to work with—three of her four matches this week went three sets, two of them against Sabalenka and Karolina Pliskova, women with their own issues on the dirt. But the record book is clear—dating back to her 2019 French Open title, Barty has an 11-match winning streak on the European clay, and a little more breathing room between herself and #2 on the ranking list, Naomi Osaka.
