Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Kerber pulls out a marathon second-round win, Cam Norrie lines up with another top-ranked opponent, and Sorana Cirstea gets some long-awaited revenge.
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 1820, the number of shots in yesterday’s protracted battle between Angelique Kerber and Sara Sorribes Tormo. Kerber was the 2018 Wimbledon champion, and her grass-court prowess may have been what made the difference, as she won 118 points to Sorribes Tormo’s 105 in a match that lasted more than three hours. According to the Wimbledon scorer’s rally count, that works out to more than eight shots per point, a staggering mark for a grass court. But we knew it wasn’t going to be Isner-Mahut out there. Kerber is well-known as a human backboard, and her defensive skills are well-suited to the low-bouncing surface. While Sorribes Tormo is a clay-courter at heart, her results in 2021 have shown that she’s good for at least two hours on court with anyone, regardless of the venue. After Kerber takes a much-deserved off-day, she plays tomorrow against Aliaksandra Sasnovich, the woman who benefited from the first-round retirement of Serena Williams. According to the Tennis Abstract forecast, Kerber is the second-biggest favorite in the women’s third round, so she might not even need three hours to get this one done.
Our second number is 8, Cameron Norrie’s total matches against top-ten opponents since October. That number includes tomorrow’s Wimbledon third-rounder against Roger Federer, and it almost equals the 9 top-ten opponents he faced in his entire career up to that point. Norrie has yet to establish himself as a giant-killer—he’s won only 2 of the 16 completed matches: one against John Isner on clay, and the other over an out-of-form Dominic Thiem this spring. But he’s getting closer. He gave Rafael Nadal a good fight in Australia this year, pushing him to a pair of 7-5 sets. And last month at Queen’s Club, he reached a deciding set in the championship match against Matteo Berrettini, one of the ATP’s best players on grass. It doesn’t seem quite fair that Norrie would draw Rafa in the Roland Garros third round and then Roger in the round of 32 at Wimbledon. But with Federer shaking off nearly two years of rust and Norrie’s level seemingly improving by the week, perhaps it’s the 8-time Wimbledon champion who should bemoan his draw.
Today’s third and final number is 12 years, the time separating on-court meetings between Victoria Azarenka and Sorana Cirstea. The pair played three times in 2008 and 2009, all at slams, and twice at Wimbledon. Back then, Vika was the far superior player, and it showed in the results, as Cirstea lost all six sets they played, including a double-bagel when they faced off at Roland Garros in 2008, shortly after Cirstea’s 18th birthday. The Romanian finally got her revenge yesterday, winning a three-setter over the 12th-seeded Azarenka. People often ask me if my forecasts include head-to-heads, and when I tell them they don’t, they often think it’s obvious that taking head-to-head results into account would improve their accuracy. The Vika-Cirstea history hints at one reason why they don’t, at least for the vast majority of matchups in which players have met only a handful of times. Whatever psychological edge Azarenka once held, Cirstea long ago shook off, and both women are very different players than they were a decade ago. In another dozen years, perhaps it will be Vika who wins their first encounter on the senior tour.
