Category: Australian Open

What Is Going Wrong For Novak Djokovic?

Also: Arina Rodionova (probably) in the top 100

Novak Djokovic practicing at the 2023 US Open. Credit: Amaury Laporte

Fifteen break points. A week has passed, a new champion has been crowned, and I still can’t stop thinking about it. In the first two sets of his Australian Open quarter-final match against Taylor Fritz, Novak Djokovic failed to convert fifteen straight break points.

It’s so far out of character as to defy belief. Djokovic has converted more than 40% of his break chances in the past year, even counting the 4-for-21 showing in the entire Fritz match. The American, one of the better servers on tour, typically saves only two-thirds of the break points he faces. The chances that Novak would come up short 15 times in a row are about one in seven million.

Even stranger, it wasn’t because Fritz served so well. He missed his first serve on 7 of the 15 break points. He hit two aces and another four didn’t come back, but that leaves nine rallies when–under pressure, in Australia–Taylor Fritz beat Novak Djokovic. Five of those lasted at least seven strokes, including a 25-shot gutbuster at 4-3 in the second set that was followed, two points later, by yet another Fritz winner on the 17th shot. All credit to the American, who walked a tightrope of down-the-line backhands and refused to give in to an opponent who, even in the first two sets, was outplaying him. But clearly this wasn’t a matter of Fritz intimidating or otherwise imposing himself on Novak.

There’s no shortage of explanations. Djokovic is recovering from a wrist injury that hampered him in his United Cup loss to Alex de Minaur. He apparently had the flu going into the Melbourne semi against Jannik Sinner. The whole Australian adventure might be nothing more than a health-marred aberration; in this interpretation, none of Jiri Lehecka, Dino Prizmic, Alexei Popyrin, or even Fritz would otherwise have taken a set from the all-time great.

But… the man is 36 years old. If other tennis players his age are any guide, he may never be fully healthy again. He will continue to get slower, if only marginally so. He personally raised the physical demands of the sport, and finally, a younger generation has accepted the challenge. Djokovic has defied the odds to stay on top for as long as he has, but eventually he will fade, even if that means only a gentle tumble out of the top three. After a month like this, we have to ask, is it the beginning of the end?

Rally intolerance

The two marathon break points that Fritz saved were not exceptions. 64 of the 269 points in the quarter-final reached a seventh shot, and the American won more than half of them. Even among double-digit rallies, the results were roughly even.

Here’s another data point: Djokovic fought out 53 points in his first-rounder against Prizmic that reached ten shots or more. The 18-year-old Croatian won 30 of them. Yeah, Prizmic is a rising star with mountains of potential, but he’s also ranked 169th in the world. This is not the Novak we’ve learned to expect: Even after retooling his game around a bigger serve and shorter points, he remained unshakeable from the baseline, his famous flexibility keeping him in position to put one more ball back in play.

Down Under, though, those skills went missing. Based on 278 charted matches since the start of 2015, the following table shows the percentage of points each year that he takes to seven shots or more, and his success rate in those rallies:

Year  7+ Freq  7+ Win%  
2015    23.3%    54.9%  
2016    26.7%    53.1%  
2017    29.1%    53.3%  
2018    24.4%    52.6%  
2019    25.0%    55.1%  
2020    26.0%    54.3%  
2021    23.8%    53.6%  
2022    23.2%    54.7%  
2023    23.4%    54.1%  
2024    26.0%    49.8%

By the standards of tennis’s small margins, that’s what it looks like to fall off a cliff. The situation probably isn’t quite so bad: The sample from 2024 is limited to only the matches against Lehecka, de Minaur, Prizmic, Fritz, and Sinner. On the other hand, matches charted in previous years also skew in favor of novelty, so upsets, close matches, and elite opponents are overrepresented there too.

It is especially unusual for Djokovic to see such a decline on hard courts. Over the last decade, he has gone through spells when he loses more long rallies than he wins. But they typically come on clay. Carlos Alcaraz shut him down in last year’s Wimbledon final as well, winning 57% of points that reached the seventh shot and 63% of those with ten or more strokes. The only period when hard-court Novak consistently failed to win this category was late 2021, when Medvedev beat him for the US Open title (and then outscored him in long rallies in Paris), and Alexander Zverev won 62% of the seven-plusses (and 70% of ten-plusses!) to knock him out of the Tour Finals.

Protracted rallies are a young man’s game, and Djokovic’s results are starting to show it. Before dissecting Alcaraz in Turin last November, Novak had never won more than half of seven-plusses against Carlitos. He has barely held on against Sinner, winning 43% of those points in their Tour Finals round-robin match and 51% at the Davis Cup Finals. In 13 meetings since 2019, Medvedev has won more of these long rallies than Djokovic has. Zverev, too, has edged him out in this category since the end of 2018.

Against the rest of the pack, Djokovic manages just fine. He dominates seven-plusses against Casper Ruud and Stefanos Tsitsipas, for instance. But it’s one of the few chinks in his armor against the best, and if January represents anything more than the temporary struggles of an ailing star, more players are figuring out how to take advantage.

Avoiding danger

For players who lose a disproportionate number of long points, the best solution is to shorten them. Djokovic may never have thought in exactly those terms, but perhaps with an eye toward energy conservation, he has done exactly that.

Especially from 2017 to 2022, Novak drastically reduced the number of points that reached the seven-shot threshold:

In 2017, 29% of his points went that long; in 2022 and 2023, barely 23% did. It remains to be seen whether January 2024 is more than a blip. In his up-and-down month, Novak remained able to control his service points, but he was less successful avoiding the grind on return. As we’ve seen, that’s dangerous territory: Djokovic won a healthy majority of the short points against Fritz but was less successful in the long ones, especially following the American’s own serve.

Much rests on the direction of these trends. If the players Djokovic has faced so far this year can prevent him from finishing points early, how will he handle Medvedev or Zverev?. If Novak can’t reliably outlast the likes of Fritz and Prizmic, what are his chances against Alcaraz?

Djokovic is well-positioned to hold on to his number one ranking until the French Open, when he’ll be 37 years old. By then, presumably, he’ll be clear of the ailments that held him back in Australia. Still, holding off the combination of Sinner, Alcaraz, Medvedev, Zverev, and Father Time will be increasingly difficult. The 24-time major champion will need to redouble the tactical effort to keep points short and somehow recover the magic that once made him so implacable in the longest rallies. Age is just a number, but few metrics are so ruthless in determining an athlete’s fate.

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Arina Rodionova on the cusp of the top 100

In December, Australian veteran Arina Rodionova celebrated her 34th birthday. Now she’s competing at the tour-level event in Hua Hin this week, sporting a new career-best ranking of 101. With a first-round upset win over sixth-seed Yue Yuan, she’s up to 99th in the live rankings. Her exact position next Monday is still to be determined–a few other women could spoil the party with deep runs, or she could climb higher with more victories of her own–but a top-100 debut is likely.

Rodionova, assuming she makes it, will be the oldest woman ever* to crack the top 100 for the first time. The record is held by Tzipi Oblizer, who was two months short of her own 34th birthday when she reached the ranking milestone in 2007. Rodionova will be just the fifth player to join the top-100 club after turning 30.

* I say “ever” with some caution: I don’t have weekly rankings before the mid-80s, so I checked back to 1987. Before then, the tour skewed even younger, so I doubt there were 30-somethings breaking into the top 100. But it’s possible.

Here is the list of oldest top-100 debuts since 1987:

Player                    Milestone  Age at debut  
Arina Rodionova*         2024-02-05          34.1  
Tzipi Obziler            2007-02-19          33.8  
Adriana Villagran Reami  1988-08-01          32.0 
Emina Bektas             2023-11-06          30.6  
Nuria Parrizas Diaz      2021-08-16          30.1  
Mihaela Buzarnescu       2017-10-16          29.5  
Julie Ditty              2007-11-05          28.8  
Eva Bes Ostariz          2001-07-16          28.5  
Maryna Zanevska          2021-11-01          28.2  
Ysaline Bonaventure      2022-10-31          28.2  
Mashona Washington       2004-07-19          28.1  
Laura Pigossi            2022-08-29          28.1  
Maureen Drake            1999-02-01          27.9  
Hana Sromova             2005-11-07          27.6  
Laura Siegemund          2015-09-14          27.5

* pending!

I extended the list to 16 places in order to include Laura Siegemund. She and Buzarnescu are the only two women to crack the top 100 after their 27th birthdays yet still ascend to the top 30. The odds are against Rodionova doing the same–the average peak of the players on the list is 67, and the majority of them achieved the milestone a half-decade earlier–but you never know.

A triumph of scheduling

Rodionova has truly sweated her way to the top. She played 105 matches last year, winning 78 of them, assembling a haul of seven titles and another three finals. When I highlighted the exploits of Emma Navarro a couple of weeks ago, I couldn’t help but draw attention to the Australian, who is one of only two women to win more matches than Navarro since the beginning of last year. Iga Swiatek is the other.

Most of the veteran’s recent triumphs–44 match wins and five of her seven 2023 titles–have come at the ITF W25 level. She didn’t beat a single top-200 player in those events, and she faced only five of them. In her long slog through the tennis world last year, Rodionova played just one match against a top-100 opponent, and that was a loss to 91st-ranked Dalma Galfi.

The point is, the Aussie earned her ranking with quantity, not quality. No shame in that: The WTA made the rules, and the Australian not only chose a schedule to maximize her chances of climbing the ranking table, she executed. Kudos to her.

What her ranking does not mean, however, is that she is one of the 100 best players in the world. Elo is a more reliable judge of that, and going into this week, the algorithm ranks her 207th. (She peaked in the 140s, back in 2017.) You can hack the WTA rankings with a punishing slate of ITFs, but it’s much harder to cheat Elo.

Here are the players in the official top 150 who Elo considers to be most overrated:

Player             Elo Rank  WTA Rank  Ratio  
Caroline Dolehide       124        41    3.0  
Peyton Stearns          145        54    2.7  
Arantxa Rus             103        43    2.4  
Tatjana Maria            94        44    2.1  
Arina Rodionova         207       101    2.0  
Laura Pigossi           221       114    1.9  
Elina Avanesyan         120        62    1.9  
Varvara Gracheva         89        46    1.9  
Nadia Podoroska         127        67    1.9  
Lucia Bronzetti         109        58    1.9  
Dayana Yastremska        54        29    1.9

Once you climb into the top 100, savvy scheduling is increasingly impractical. Instead, this kind of gap comes from a deep run or two combined with many other unimpressive losses. Caroline Dolehide reached the final in Guadalajara followed by a quarter-final exit at a WTA 125, then lost three of five matches in Australia. Arantxa Rus won the title in Hamburg and reached a W100 semi-final, then lost five of six. The WTA formula lets you keep all the points from a big win for 52 weeks; Elo takes them away if you don’t keep demonstrating that you belong at the new level.

The sub-200 Elo rank suggests that Rodionova will have a hard time sustaining her place on the WTA list once the ranking points from her W25 titles start to come off the board. Until then, she can continue to pad her total and–fingers crossed–enjoy the hard-earned reward of a double-digit ranking.

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Yes, Jannik Sinner Really Is This Good

Also: Australian Open coverage recap

Jannik Sinner

Don’t let Daniil Medvedev’s near-miss in the Australian Open final fool you: Jannik Sinner is the best player in the world right now. Like Sunday’s championship match, it’s close–but it might not be close for long.

I wrote in December about what I called the “most exclusive clubs” in tennis. Since 1991, when the ATP began keeping these stats, Andre Agassi and Novak Djokovic have been the only two players to finish a season in the top three of both hold percentage and break percentage. (Agassi did it twice.) Well, in the last 52 weeks, Sinner ranks second in hold percentage behind Hubert Hurkacz, and he stands third in break percentage, trailing only Medvedev and Carlos Alcaraz. It’s not a calendar year so we can’t officially add him to the list, but he’s playing as well on both sides of the ball as anyone ever has, apart from two all-time greats.

Oh, and on hard courts, Sinner out-holds even Hurkacz. He gets broken less than anyone in the game, securing his serve 89.9% of the time.

But wait–it’s even better than that. Alex Gruskin pointed out that since Wimbledon, Sinner’s hold percentage is 91.1%, within shouting distance of John Isner’s career mark of 91.8%. Isner cracked the top ten by combining that monster serve with a return that only a mother could love. Sinner, on the other hand, pairs absolutely dominant serving with one of the best returns in the game. Ever wonder what would happen if Big John had an elite return? Now you know.

Starting the clock at Wimbledon might raise an eyebrow–is that just the line that spits out the most impressive number?–but it’s a sensible way to divide the data. In June, not long before the Championships, Sinner rolled out a new, simplified service motion. While the measurements of the new delivery are not overwhelming–one more mile per hour, four centimeters closer to the line, a 0.7 percentage-point increase in first serves in–the results have been devastating. His serve has always been good; perhaps a few minor tweaks were all it took to make it great.

Winning how?

First, a bit of a puzzle. In the last 52 weeks, Sinner ranks fifth on tour in serve points won, with 68.3%. (Why not first or second, in line with his hold percentage? We’ll come back to that.) Yet despite the Isner comparisons, he doesn’t get it done the easy way. He hits aces just 8.4% of the time. That’s equal to the average of the ATP top 50, and it’s fewer than Djokovic.

The answer doesn’t lie in unreturned serves, either. Some players do get more free points than their ace counts imply. Stefanos Tsitsipas, for instance, ranks well down the ace list, finishing just 9% of his serve points that way. But he looks much more elite when we measure how many don’t come back–almost one-third, in his case. Sinner’s 29.6% rate of unreturned serves is above average, but it’s hardly the stuff that record-breaking hold numbers are made of. The next man on the list, for comparison’s sake, is Frances Tiafoe.

What about plus-ones? Sinner serves big, but relatively speaking, his groundstrokes are even bigger. Can we explain his serve-game success by the rate at which he ends points with his second shot?

Still no! He wins 40% of his serve points by the third shot of the rally. Again, that’s a solid mark: Djokovic and Alcaraz are about the same. On the other hand, so is Jiri Lehecka, and Tiafoe is even better.

Once a point reaches the fourth or fifth shot–especially if it began with a second serve–winning it is more about contesting a rally than converting any lingering advantage of the serve. If the returner puts the fourth stroke of the point in play, he has a 52% chance of winning it. Big servers still get some easy putaways, but opportunities disappear as the rally develops. When that happens, winning service points relies on a different set of skills–assets that Sinner, unlike many a big server, amply possesses.

Sinner, then, has the whole package, even if no single one of his weapons stands out like the Isner serve. He serves big enough to clean up 40% of points with his first or second shot. It the point lasts longer, he has probably hung on to more of an advantage than most players do: His heavy, deep groundstrokes see to that. In a really long rally, okay, maybe the edge goes to Medvedev or Alcaraz, but who else is going to outlast the Italian?

Most players excel at some stage of service points, but not all. The following graph illustrates how service points typically develop, by showing the server’s chance of winning the point when each successive shot is put in play. Based on charted men’s matches since 2021, servers win 64.2% of points. That goes up to 66.5% if they land a serve; it goes down to 52.5% if the return comes back. Several strokes later the server’s advantage is mostly gone: If he puts the 7th shot of the point in play, his chances of winning are 57.4%; if the returner comes back with an 8th shot, the server’s odds are down to 45%.

I’ve shown that progression along with specific numbers for Hurkacz, in order to demonstrate how these things go with our usual image of a big server:

While the differences between Hurkacz and tour average are modest, you get the idea. Early in the point, a big server cleans up; the longer the rally goes, the further his results fall below the line.

Now, the same graph with Sinner’s results from 2021 to the present:

He doesn’t start as high as Hurkacz, but he does do a little better than average. Crucially, he never falls below the average line, and the longer the point extends, the more he surpasses it.

I hope you’ve stuck with me this far, because the payoff is worth it. Same graph, only instead of Sinner’s three-plus-year average, we have his numbers since the beginning of 2023:

At the beginning of the point, Sinner is almost equal to Hurkacz. From then on, he takes over. A surprising gap comes early, at the two-plus rally mark, indicating that he doesn’t make many mistakes with his plus-one shot, even if he doesn’t put away an overwhelming number of them. No matter how long the point continues, the Italian outperforms tour average for that particular situation.

In tennis, it’s almost impossible to be good at everything. You can put together a nice, quite lucrative career by merely getting close to average in most categories and having one or two standout weapons. Sinner, we’re beginning to see, is not just good at everything, he is verging on great.

Break points

We now know why Sinner is winning so many serve points. But I mentioned another mystery we have yet to resolve. The Italian ranks fifth in the last 52 weeks in serve points won, the middle of a tightly-packed trio with Nicolas Jarry and Taylor Fritz, about one percentage point behind Hurkacz, Tsitsipas, and Djokovic. Yet he challenges Hurkacz for the top spot in the closely related, more consequential category of hold percentage:

Player               Hld% Rk   Hld%  SPW Rk   SPW%  
Hubert Hurkacz             1  89.1%       1  69.6%  
Jannik Sinner              2  88.8%       5  68.3%  
Stefanos Tsitsipas         3  88.4%       2  69.5%  
Novak Djokovic             4  87.6%       3  69.4%  
Nicolas Jarry              5  87.1%       4  68.4%  
Alexander Zverev           6  86.1%       7  67.4%  
Taylor Fritz               7  86.0%       6  68.2%  
Christopher Eubanks        8  85.8%       8  67.1%  
Carlos Alcaraz             9  85.7%      10  67.0%  
Tallon Griekspoor         10  85.1%      12  66.7%

The lists are almost identical, except for Sinner’s placement. He wins points at almost the same rate as Jarry and Fritz, yet he holds serve more often than either one.

As mysteries go, this isn’t a tough one. Not all points are created equal; if you win more of the important ones, you’ll outperform the players who don’t. Nobody knows that better than Sinner, who upset Djokovic in Turin despite winning exactly the same number of points, then beat him again at the Davis Cup with just 89 points to Novak’s 93. He out-pointed Medvedev yesterday 142 to 141.

Sinner wins these matches by saving break points at a remarkable clip. While winning 68.3% of serve points overall, he has held off 71.7% of break chances, including 36 of 40 in Melbourne. No one else on tour tops 69%, and Hurkacz comes in at 65%. On average, top-50 men save break points two percentage points less than they win typical serve points (63.5% to 65.5%), mostly because stronger returners generate more break points.

The question, then, is whether this is sustainable. ATP numbers indicate that Sinner goes bigger on break points, averaging 125 mile-per-hour first serves in those situations rather than his usual 122s. It seems to be working, but it can’t be that straightforward. Surely he isn’t the first player to arrive at the strategy of simply hitting harder, and besides, that usually comes at a cost. Will he continue to land enough of those bigger first serves to justify the payoff?

I can’t answer that question, but I can tell you what usually happens after a season of break-point overperformance: It doesn’t last. Taking over 2,600 player-seasons since 1991, 582 (21.7%) of players saved more break points than they won serve points overall. 183 (6.8%) matched Sinner’s mark of saving at least two percentage points more than their serve-points-won rate.

Of those 183, just eleven repeated the feat the following year. None of them were big servers, and nobody managed it three years in a row. The average following-year performance of the 183 men was 1.5 percentage points fewer break points saved than their rate of serve points won–just a tick better than tour average.

Unless Sinner has developed a new secret sauce–to be clear, with Darren Cahill in his corner, I’m not ruling it out!–that’s probably the fate that awaits him. In more than three decades, only 23 men have saved at least 71.7% of the break points they faced for a full season. The Italian probably won’t keep that up, and his out-of-this-world hold percentage will fall to something more plausible, in the 86-87% range.

Fortunately, that’s still exceptionally good. The 22-year-old serves like Jarry or Fritz while racking up as many return points as Djokovic. Take away the break point magic and you still have a contender for every slam. Sinner continues to lurk in fourth place in the official ATP rankings, but as of today, he is number one on the Elo list. Before long, those positions will converge, and it won’t be because his Elo rating goes back down.

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AO recap

I hope you’ve enjoyed my coverage throughout the Australian Open. I’ll continue to write this sort of thing throughout the year, though not always every weekday!

In case you missed it, here are the ten other articles posted since the action in Melbourne began:

Thank you for reading.

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Aryna Sabalenka Under Pressure

Also today: January 26, 1924

Aryna Sabalenka at Wimbledon in 2023. Credit: Adrian Scottow

It felt like a pivotal moment. Aryna Sabalenka had taken a 5-2 first-set lead in yesterday’s Australian Open semi-final against Coco Gauff. Gauff kept the set going with a strong service game for 5-3. Sabalenka lost the first point on her serve, but bounced back with a plus-one backhand winner.

At 30-15, the American struck again. She took advantage of a Sabalenka second serve to drag the Belarusian into a backhand rally, ultimately drawing an unforced error on the ninth shot and putting the game back in play.

Then, still just two points from the set, Sabalenka double-faulted.

The narrative practically writes itself. Aryna hits hard, aims for the lines, and keeps points short. Let her do that, and she will destroy you. Her first five opponents in Melbourne managed a grand total of 16 games against her. On the other hand, if you keep the ball in play, she’ll start pressing, trying too hard to dictate with her serve, going for too much when a smackable groundstroke presents itself.

Gauff, by this reading, is Sabalenka’s nightmare opponent. She won the US Open final by denying the Belarusian one would-be winner after another. Not only can she take Sabalenka’s game away from her, but Coco–at least on a good day–won’t give it back on her own serve. When she lets loose, Gauff wields just as much power as her more tactically aggressive opponent.

As it turned out, Sabalenka did lose that service game. Several twists and turns later, Gauff led the set, 6-5. Only then did Aryna regroup, winning four straight points from 30-love to force a tiebreak, then dropping just two more points to clinch the set. Gauff kept the second set close, but Sabalenka never allowed her to reach break point. The contest closed with a narrative-busting move: Facing match point, Gauff pulled out a 12-stroke rally, the kind of point that has been known to steer her opponent off course. But instead of compounding the damage, Sabalenka came back with two unreturned serves. Game over.

What to believe, then? Was the apparent first-set turning point a reflection of the true Sabalenka? Or is this the new Aryna, who slams the door when challengers sniff opportunity? Or is it something else, the all-too-common story in which someone looks like a clutch hero or a constant choker, only for us to discover, after crunching all the numbers, that she’s impervious to momentum and plays pretty much the same all the time?

Recovering at a disadvantage

Sabalenka’s serve games do follow a pattern after she loses a longish rally. But the results are not entirely straightforward.

On the next point (assuming the lost rally didn’t end the service game), Aryna is more likely to miss her first serve:

Year   1stIn%  post-rallyL-1stIn%  Change  
2019    61.2%               55.9%   -8.6%  
2020    61.5%               57.0%   -7.3%  
2021    58.6%               52.6%  -10.3%  
2022    60.0%               59.9%    0.0%  
2023    61.1%               61.3%    0.4%  
2024    63.3%               62.5%   -1.2%
----  
TOTAL   60.5%               57.6%   -4.8%

Most of the effect is concentrated in the earlier years of her career on tour. Yesterday, the trend ran in the opposite direction: She made nearly 76% of her first serves overall, but after Gauff won a rally, she landed 88% of them.

The trend is clearer–and persisting to the present–when we look at double faults after losing a rally:

Year     DF%  post-rallyL-DF%  Change  
2019    8.6%            10.4%   20.8%  
2020    6.2%             8.4%   36.9%  
2021    7.9%            11.8%   50.3%  
2022   10.7%            10.1%   -5.5%  
2023    6.2%             7.2%   16.5%  
2024    3.4%             8.3%  144.7%  
----
TOTAL   7.9%             9.6%   22.5%

2022 was Aryna’s year of the yips; she was more likely to bunch double faults together than hit them in particularly nervy spots. (Put another way: Every spot was a nervy one.) The 2024 number will surely come back to earth, but it is still revealing: Sabalenka has made so much progress in this aspect of her game, but her second-serve struggles continue when she faces the threat of getting dragged into another rally.

Some of these effects persist even longer. From those service games that last long enough, here are Sabalenka’s first-in and double-fault percentages two points after losing a long rally:

Year   1stIn%  +2 1stIn%  Change    DF%  +2 DF%  Change  
2019    61.2%      55.8%   -8.8%   8.6%    8.7%    1.2%  
2020    61.5%      50.5%  -17.9%   6.2%    7.2%   17.1%  
2021    58.6%      56.0%   -4.5%   7.9%    8.7%   10.5%  
2022    60.0%      63.1%    5.3%  10.7%    7.8%  -27.1%  
2023    61.1%      59.2%   -3.2%   6.2%    8.4%   35.6%  
2024    63.3%      57.1%   -9.7%   3.4%    2.4%  -30.1%  
----
TOTAL   60.5%      57.1%   -5.6%   7.9%    8.0%    2.0%

She continues to miss more first serves even two points after the rally setback. To some degree, the memory should have dissipated–after all, something else happened on the intervening point. On the other hand, she’s back in the same court. If a reliable serve didn’t work in the deuce court at 30-love, there’s reason to doubt it at 30-all.

The double fault trends are less clear, in part because our sample size is shrinking and double faults are blessedly rare. If nothing else, it’s safe to conclude that the explosion of double faults on the point after the lost rally doesn’t continue to nearly the same degree.

Tallying the cost

Now, this all seems bad. Sabalenka possesses one of the best first serves in the game; her whole attack is built around it. Her emergence as a superstar came after she got control of the service yips and cut her double faults down to manageable levels. After losing a long rally, she needs her serve more than ever, and–at least by comparison with other situations–it isn’t there for her.

Except… it doesn’t matter! At least not on the first point. Here is the bottom-line figure of service points won:

Year    SPW%  post-rallyL-SPW%  Change  
2019   59.6%             63.8%    7.2%  
2020   60.3%             56.6%   -6.0%  
2021   61.5%             61.3%   -0.3%  
2022   57.2%             59.9%    4.7%  
2023   63.7%             63.9%    0.4%  
2024   66.7%             70.8%    6.3%  
----
TOTAL  60.7%             61.7%    1.6%

Fewer first serves, but more serve points won. It isn’t supposed to work like that, but Sabalenka bounces back strong from lost rallies. A shift of +1.6% in her favor is solid enough, and it’s even better if you look solely at the last three years.

Part of the explanation is that she tightens up the rest of her game–exactly the opposite of what my off-the-cuff narrative suggests. Under pressure, I hypothesized, she would try too hard to end points. Instead, after losing a long rally, she’s more willing than usual to play another one: She commits 14% fewer plus-one errors than her usual rate, implying a lower rate of aggression when she has an early chance to put the point away.

On the second point after losing a long rally, the bottom-line outcomes are more mixed:

Year    SPW%  +2 SPW%  Change  
2019   59.6%    53.9%   -9.5%  
2020   60.3%    55.3%   -8.3%  
2021   61.5%    58.5%   -4.9%  
2022   57.2%    61.5%    7.4%  
2023   63.7%    60.7%   -4.7%  
2024   66.7%    71.4%    7.1% 
---- 
TOTAL  60.7%    58.2%   -4.0%

While these aren’t as rosy as the next-point results, focus on the last few years. Since the beginning of 2022, Aryna has won more service points than usual when she returns to the serving direction where she recently lost a long rally–despite landing fewer first serves. She is even stingier with plus-one errors on these points, coughing up 29% fewer than usual.

These trends did not hold in yesterday’s semi-final. While Sabalenka made more first serves on the two points after Gauff outlasted her in a rally, fewer of them ended in her favor: 4% less on the first point, 12% less on the second. We can’t read too much into single-match totals with stats like these: 4% is a difference of one point. And Gauff is a far superior returner and baseline player than the typical WTAer, one who is unlikely to lose focus after going toe to toe with Sabalenka for a point or two. The average player pushes Aryna to a seventh shot barely one-tenth of the time; Gauff did so on one of every six points yesterday.

All of this leads us to an unexpected conclusion: Does Aryna Sabalenka have nerves of steel? First serves and double faults are just components in a larger picture; when we measure her results by points won, Sabalenka serves more successfully right after an opponent makes her uncomfortable. The yips are gone, and the on-court histrionics are a diversion that deceived us all. Aryna under pressure may be even more fearsome than her typical, terrifying self.

* * *

January 26, 1924: Suzanne’s longest day

Suzanne Lenglen wasn’t accustomed to spending much time on court. In eight tournaments since the 1923 Championships at Wimbledon, she had lost just ten games. Her doubles matches, especially with net maven Elizabeth Ryan at her side, were often just as lopsided. She never missed, she could put the ball anywhere on the court, and most opponents were lucky just to win a single point.

Lenglen and Ryan in 1925 at Wimbledon. Colorization credit: Women’s Tennis Colorizations

In January 1924, Lenglen eased her way back onto the circuit. Battling some combination of illness, anxiety, and hypochondria, she didn’t return to singles action until February. (She’d win her first three matches before dropping a game.) But she was a celebrity on the French Riviera, and she was prevailed upon to compete in doubles. She won the mixed at the Hotel Beau-Site tournament in Cannes to ring in the new year, and she entered both the women’s doubles–with Ryan–and the mixed at the Hotel Gallia tournament a few weeks later.

On the 26th, Lenglen and Ryan completed their waltz through the draw, defeating a British pair, Phyllis Covell and Dorothy Shepherd-Barron, 6-3, 6-4. Suzanne’s most aggravating foe was another Brit, a line judge with the temerity to call a foot-fault on the five-time Wimbledon champion. She tried to get the man removed and ultimately had to settle for his “voluntary” departure. “It is unfair,” she said. “The English are pigs.”

Her nerves would be tested even more severely in the mixed doubles final. Lenglen partnered Charles Aeschlimann of Switzerland, while Ryan teamed with the 43-year-old Canadian Henry Mayes. Both men were better known on the Riviera than in the tennis world at large, more clubbable than talented. Lenglen and Ryan–herself one of the top few woman players in the world–would be the stars of the show.

Lenglen and Aeschlimann took the first set, 6-4; Ryan and Mayes came back with a 6-1 frame of their own. The underdogs–that is, the team without Suzanne–built up an early lead in the third, thanks to Aeschlimann’s inconsistency and Ryan’s glittering play. Mayes served for a 4-2 advantage, but a lucky netcord halted their momentum, and the deciding set settled into a rhythm it wouldn’t break for 20 more games.

Only at 13-14 did Ryan finally give in. She gifted a double fault to her opponents, and Mayes’s fatigue–he had played a four-set men’s doubles final beforehand–began to tell. Lenglen and Aeschlimann broke serve, securing the 6-4, 1-6, 15-13 victory. It would stand as the longest set of Suzanne’s unparalleled career.

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How To Play One-Set Shootouts Like Daniil Medvedev

Daniil Medvedev in 2023, practicing… something. Credit: Hameltion

In yesterday’s Australian Open quarter-final match against Hubert Hurkacz, Daniil Medvedev came through with his second five-set win of the tournament. In the decider, Hurkacz’s level dropped, Medvedev kept his ground game tight, and the Russian converted the one break point on offer. Four hours of tennis, compressed into a few crucial moments, and Medvedev has a place in the semi-finals.

Not long ago, Medvedev gained a reputation as a disappointment in deciding sets. He lost 11 of 15 three- and five-setters in 2022, and yesterday’s match was the first time in nine tries–going back to Melbourne two years ago–that he had beaten a top-ten player in a climactic set.

But such trends are easy to exaggerate. For one, three of those eight consecutive losses were clustered at the 2022 Tour Finals, where the Russian managed, remarkably, to drop third-set tiebreaks in all of his round-robin matches. Not the best way to ensure a restful offseason, but hardly an indictment of his ability to hang around late into matches with the best players in the game.

Further, except for the 2022 season, Medvedev has developed a knack for cleaning up close matches with everybody else:

Year   Decider W-L  Decider W%  
2024           2-0      100.0%  
2023          14-6       70.0%  
2022          4-11       26.7%  
2021          14-5       73.7%  
2020           9-4       69.2%  
2019         10-11       47.6%  
2018          16-9       64.0%  
2017          13-6       68.4%  
2016          23-9       71.9% 
---- 
Total       105-61       63.3%

2016 shouldn’t really count, since it’s a mix of ITFs, Challengers, and early forays onto the main tour, but given the results, I figured it was worth including. Wherever you draw the line, it’s hardly the case that Medvedev struggles in such matches. Recently, I looked into what a player’s third-set record “should” be, given their skill level, and a mark above 60% is better than expected for nearly anyone.

You might argue that the Russian shouldn’t have racked up so many deciders. He was expected to finish off Emil Ruusuvuori much more quickly than he did in the second round in Australia, and even on clay, he should never have gotten dragged to a fifth set at Roland Garros by Thiago Seyboth Wild, much less lost it. But everyone takes the scenic route sometimes. 14 of Medvedev’s deciding sets last year came against the top 50, 10 of them against the top 20.

The final set shift

When a match is reduced to a one-set shootout, it becomes a bit less serve-centric. This is a persistent finding in all high-pressure situations, from tiebreaks to break points to fifth sets. Servers get a bit more cautious, returners heighten their focus, and quick points are harder to come by.

The effects are small but real. In the 1,200-plus men’s deciding sets since 2017 logged by the Match Charting Project, servers win 1.1% fewer points in the final set that they did in the first two or four. They land fractionally more of their first serves, but only by increasing their margins: The percent of unreturned serves falls by more than 5%. The average rally increases from 4.1 strokes to 4.3.

There are two fundamental ways to benefit from those changes. First, you can buck the trend, continuing to serve big while your opponent succumbs to the natural tendency toward caution. That’s part of the reason that John Isner and Roger Federer were two of the very few players to win more tiebreaks than expected over long periods of time. It’s not easy, especially if fatigue is setting in. But if you can keep serving the way you did for two or four sets, you have a minor edge in the decider.

Second, you can be the type of player who excels in deciding-set-style tennis. If you had to pick between Medvedev and Hurkacz in a contest where more serves would come back and points would last longer, the choice is simple, right? It’s no guarantee, to be sure: The shift is a minor one, and it may not show up in any given match. Yesterday, more points were decided in four shots or less in the fifth set than in the first four. But on average, the trend moves in the other direction, right into the Russian’s wheelhouse.

Evidence shows that Medvedev follows these prescriptions, maintaining his attack on serve while taking advantage of more cautious opponents. Other top players, to varying degrees, do the same.

Let’s start with the basics. For each stat, I calculated every player’s performance in deciding sets, and in all previous sets. The numbers I’m about to show you are the ratio between those numbers, a measure of how much their tactics change when the final set begins. Positive numbers mean they do more of it in the decider, negative means they do less. We’ll look at the four Australian Open semi-finalists, plus Carlos Alcaraz (because of course) and Hurkacz (because of his deciding-set notoriety). Keep in mind that Novak Djokovic’s figures are limited to matches since 2017.

Here are the rate of serve points won, and the rate of first serves in:

Player             SPW%  1stIn%  
Carlos Alcaraz     3.9%    4.4%  
Jannik Sinner      2.6%   -1.2%  
Novak Djokovic     1.5%   -1.1%  
Hubert Hurkacz     0.8%   -1.9%  
-- Average --     -1.1%    0.7%  
Daniil Medvedev   -1.2%   -1.7%  
Alexander Zverev  -4.5%    3.2%

Medvedev is in line with tour average when it comes to winning service points: He doesn’t hold on to as many in deciding sets. Average isn’t bad in this case, though it looks mediocre in this company. A more encouraging sign, at least in terms of the tactical approach, is the change in first serves in. The Russian, in line with Djokovic, Hurkacz, and Jannik Sinner, seems to take a few more chances in the shootout. Alcaraz defies gravity, serving more conservatively yet winning more points, and Zverev looks out of place, a caricature of prudence.

Now let’s look at the percentage of serves that don’t come back (Unret%), as well as the percent of service points won in three shots or less (SPW% <=3):

Player            Unret%  SPW% <=3  
Novak Djokovic     10.9%      5.4%  
Carlos Alcaraz      0.2%      1.0%  
Daniil Medvedev    -0.6%     -2.0%  
Hubert Hurkacz     -1.1%      0.2%  
-- Average --      -5.7%     -3.6%  
Jannik Sinner      -7.4%      0.3%  
Alexander Zverev  -13.4%    -11.2%

The first rule of writing about men's tennis: Whatever the topic, you'll eventually end up showering praise on Djokovic. In recent years, he has learned how to get more out of his serve, and he turns that knob even further in deciding sets. Most players struggle to simply stay above water in the final set; Djokovic starts serving bigger.

Medvedev's rate of unreturned serves is the sort of positive sign it takes a connoisseur to appreciate: "-0.6%" doesn't turn up on many Hall of Fame plaques. But when the typical player serves so much more carefully, the Russian's consistency works to his advantage. His three-shots-or-less win rate does not stand out as much, but it is still less of a step backward than the typical tour player takes.

Once again, deciding-set Alexander Zverev is an unusual beast.

Opportunistic returning

If the challenge on serve is to keep attacking in the final set, the task on return is to take advantage of an opponent who probably isn't doing that. Ideally, that might mean more aggression on the return, but a 1% or 5% weaker first serve is still only so playable. Instead, players should make sure not to squander the chances they're given: Make more returns, then tighten up the ground game for the inevitable rallies.

Here are three stats to illustrate deciding-set return tendencies, again expressed as ratios between how each player performs in the final set, compared to previous sets:

Player            Ret InPlay%  UFE/Pt    FH%  
Alexander Zverev         6.7%    1.1%   1.0%  
Daniil Medvedev          3.9%   -3.2%  -1.2%  
Novak Djokovic           3.0%  -10.5%   1.5%  
Hubert Hurkacz           2.9%   -1.7%   0.3%  
Carlos Alcaraz           2.7%  -10.4%  -1.9%  
-- Average --            2.5%   -2.4%  -0.3%  
Jannik Sinner           -1.2%    0.1%   0.4%

Zverev, as we might have guessed, gets a lot of deciding-set returns in play. He's exceedingly conservative by every other measure we've seen, so why not here? Behind him, heading the non-pusher category, is Medvedev, who gets nearly 4% more returns in play in the final set that he did up to that point.

Unlike Zverev, the Russian also stays in control throughout the rally. He doesn't suddenly discover the otherworldly control of Djokovic and Alcaraz, who somehow reduce their unforced error rates by 10% in the deciding set, but he leads the rest of the pack, cutting down his mistakes by more than the tour average.

The third metric shown here--forehands as a percentage of all groundstrokes--is simply a curiosity. There's no right or wrong way to choose strokes, at least not at the level of the whole tour. As we saw last week, Medvedev and Zverev go for backhands on the plus-one shot more than anyone else, because they are in the unusual position that it might really be their stronger option. If a player improves his ground game in the fifth set--and this is nothing more than a hypothesis--it might show up in the numbers as more shots from his preferred wing. None of these men show a dramatic shift in shot selection, but I can't help but notice that Medvedev hits a few more backhands in the final set than he did in the two of four sets it took to get there.

If Medvedev reaches a fifth set in tomorrow's semi-final against Zverev, he won't need this level of savvy to know what's going on. The German's tactics, whether by design or instinct, are abundantly clear. Zverev can turn a shootout into a war of attrition, with two fifth-set tiebreaks already in Melbourne and an astonishing record of 22 deciding sets won in his last 26 attempts. While it will doubtless be a grind, the Russian might just be able to use his opponent's passivity against him. Faced with the tiny margins of a grand slam fifth set, every edge is worth exploiting.

* * *

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How Coco Gauff Escaped a Trap of Her Own Making

Also today: Jannik Sinner’s near-unbreakability

Coco Gauff at the 2022 US Open. Credit: All-Pro Reels

Coco Gauff is not a pusher, but she can do an awfully good impression of one. In yesterday’s Australian Open quarter-final against Marta Kostyuk, the American coughed up 50 unforced errors against just 17 winners. The average rally lasted 4.6 strokes, a modest number that was rescued from marathon territory only by Gauff’s many unreturned serves.

Coco’s forehand, the usual culprit when things get messy, was on full display yesterday. While the stroke has shown signs of improvement–only 9% of them contributed to the unforced error tally, below both tour average and Gauff’s own standard–it remains loopy, and it gets ever-more cautious under pressure. Kostyuk was willing to go after the high-bouncing mid-court groundstrokes, often putting Gauff on the run. Fortunately for the American, her defense rarely deserts her. She eked out a three-hour, 7-6, 6-7, 6-2 victory for a place in the Melbourne semi-finals.

My impression watching the match was that Gauff put an unreasonable number of returns–especially forehand returns–in the middle of the court, not too deep, and that Kostyuk was punishing them. I was partly right: The Ukrainian forced Coco to hit forehand after forehand against the serve, more than two-thirds of her service returns all told. Gauff did indeed send more of those balls down the middle, closer to the service line than the baseline. And Kostyuk attacked… but to little avail.

Let’s get into the numbers. The Match Charting Project divides the court into thirds, both in terms of direction (forehand side, backhand side, and middle) and depth (shallow [in the service boxes], deep [closer to the service line than the baseline], and very deep). All else equal, shots deep and/or to the sides of the court are better, though of course they are riskier. Some returns will inevitably end up down the middle and shallow; the goal is only to avoid it when possible.

Here is how Gauff’s performance yesterday compared to tour average and her own typical rate of service returns that went down the middle and didn’t land close to the baseline:

RETURNS          Middle/Not Very Deep  
Tour Average                    34.0%  
Coco Average                    40.5%  
Coco vs Kostyuk                 43.7%

Indifferent return placement is nothing new for the American, and she left even more hittable plus-ones for Kostyuk than usual. It wasn’t as bad as last year’s US Open final against Aryna Sabalenka, when Gauff put more than half of her returns in the less effective zones, but Kostyuk is no Sabalenka when it comes to imposing her will with the serve.

Return placement matters. On average, tour players win 46% of points when they land a down-the-middle, not very deep return. When they put the ball anywhere else–closer to the baseline or a sideline–they win 56%. Gauff is a little better behind the weak returns, but for her career, the gap is still present: 47% versus 55%.

Except… that isn’t what happened yesterday!

RETURN OUTCOMES  Mid/NVP W%  Better W%  
Tour Average          46.2%      56.3%  
Coco Average          46.9%      54.8%  
Coco vs Kostyuk       60.0%      55.2%

When Gauff placed a return near a line, her results yesterday were typical. But Kostyuk was unable to capitalize on the rest. Among 88 matches logged by the Match Charting Project, Gauff has won 60% of those middle/not-very-deep returns only a dozen times, usually in blowouts.

Judging from the American’s performance on return, she could have made quick work of yesterday’s contest, too. The sticking point came on her own side of the ball, where her non-committal forehands didn’t work out as well.

Minus-ones

On the WTA tour, when the return lands in play, the server has nearly lost her advantage. A good first serve can give her a lingering edge, or a well-placed return can tilt the balance in the other direction, but overall, the point begins again as a neutral proposition. Servers win 52% of those points.

Gauff, on average, does a little better, converting her serve 53% of the time. There are signs she’s improving, as well. In the US Open final against Sabalenka, she won 55%, and in the Auckland final this month versus Elina Svitolina, she picked up 59%. Apart from lopsided matches, the high-50s are the best anyone can do on an ongoing basis: Iga Swiatek’s average is 57%, and Sabalenka’s is 55%.

Coco won 39% against Kostyuk.

Gauff’s lack of confidence in her forehand showed up in multiple ways. First, she didn’t use it as much as a plus-one weapon. She usually hits 57% of her plus-one shots from the forehand side, in line with tour average. Yesterday, that rate was just 51%, something that had more to do with her own choices than any return magic that Kostyuk conjured up.

Then, she didn’t do much with those forehands. The following table shows plus-one forehand rates (3F%), the percentage of plus-one forehands hit down the middle (FH Mid%), and the server’s winning percentage (FH Mid W%) behind those down-the-middle forehands:

PLUS-ONES          3F%  FH Mid%  FH Mid W%  
Tour Average     56.6%    29.9%      45.9%  
Coco Average     57.2%    35.0%      47.0%  
Coco vs Kostyuk  50.7%    39.5%      40.0%

Gauff magnified her own tendency to go back down the middle with her second-shot forehand. It didn’t work, as she won just 40% of those points, compared to her typical rate of 47%.

Even beyond the plus-one, Coco just kept pushing the forehand. She went down the middle with 46% of her forehands, compared with her usual 37% and the tour average of 28%. She won barely one-third of the points when she did so, partly because of the nine unforced errors she racked up playing an already conservative shot. Two of those missed down-the-middle forehands came on back-to-back points when she could hardly afford them, taking her from 15-all to 15-40 when trying to close out the match at 5-3 in the second set.

In the end, as we’ve seen, Gauff’s defense saved her. She won more than half of Kostyuk’s serve points despite lackluster returning. Had she served just a little better–she missed six straight first serves in that 5-3 game–she would have finished the job an hour sooner. Had she attacked a bit more effectively with her second shots, even the off-day from the line wouldn’t have amounted to much.

To state the obvious: She’ll have to play better to beat Sabalenka in tomorrow’s semi-finals. One thing, at least, will work in Coco’s favor: She’ll have many fewer choices to make. The defending champion will dictate play and give her less time to think than Kostyuk did. Gauff withstood the Belarusian barrage in New York, winning the US Open title despite a couple of detours against less aggressive players in the early rounds. The American can’t play tomorrow like she did yesterday, but thankfully, Sabalenka won’t let her.

* * *

Jannik Sinner’s near-unbreakability

Jannik Sinner has lost his serve just twice en route to the Australian Open semi-finals. He has faced 28 break points and saved 26 of them.

Since 1991, when the ATP started keeping the relevant stats, he is the 26th player to reach the final four at a major with so few breaks of his own serve:

Tournament  Semi-finalist       BP Faced  Broken  
2013 USO    Rafael Nadal               6       0  
2018 Wimb   John Isner                 7       0  
2015 Wimb   Roger Federer              3       1  
1994 Wimb   Pete Sampras               9       1  
2015 AO     Novak Djokovic            11       1  
2014 Wimb   Roger Federer             12       1  
1997 Wimb   Pete Sampras              12       1  
2010 USO    Rafael Nadal              14       1  
2012 RG     Rafael Nadal              17       1  
2004 Wimb   Roger Federer             17       1  

Tournament  Semi-finalist       BP Faced  Broken  
2014 Wimb   Milos Raonic               9       2  
2011 RG     Novak Djokovic*            9       2  
2007 USO    Roger Federer              9       2  
2006 Wimb   Roger Federer              9       2  
2006 Wimb   Rafael Nadal               9       2  
2015 USO    Roger Federer             11       2  
2014 AO     Roger Federer             11       2  
1997 USO    Greg Rusedski             11       2  
1993 AO     Pete Sampras**            12       2  
2013 Wimb   JM del Potro              13       2  
2019 AO     Rafael Nadal              15       2  
2008 Wimb   Roger Federer             15       2  
2005 AO     Andy Roddick              15       2  
1998 Wimb   Pete Sampras              17       2  
2000 AO     Yevgeny Kafelnikov        22       2  
2024 AO     Jannik Sinner             28       2

* Djokovic won one round by W/O and another by retirement
** I don't have stats for Sampras's QF, but the final score suggests that he wasn't broken

Pretty good company! As the table makes clear, though, Sinner’s 28 break points faced is not so elite. In fact, the average major semi-finalist faces exactly 28 break points in his first five matches.

The Italian’s accomplishment, then, is saving so many. 26 of 28 is a 93% clip, and that is more rarefied air:

Tounament  Player      Faced  Saved   Save%  
2013 USO   Nadal           6      6  100.0%  
2018 Wimb  Isner           7      7  100.0%  
2012 RG    Nadal          17     16   94.1%  
2004 Wimb  Federer        17     16   94.1%  
2010 USO   Nadal          14     13   92.9%  
2024 AO    Sinner         28     26   92.9%  
2014 Wimb  Federer        12     11   91.7%  
1997 Wimb  Sampras        12     11   91.7%  
2015 AO    Djokovic       11     10   90.9%  
2000 AO    Kafelnikov     22     20   90.9%

Things will get tougher on Friday, when Sinner faces all-time-great returner Novak Djokovic for a place in the final. Then again, Djokovic failed to convert his first 15 break points against Taylor Fritz yesterday–maybe he was just preparing for the matchup with Sinner.

* * *

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Anna Kalinskaya At Her Peak

Also today: Upsets, (partly) explained; January 23, 1924

Anna Kalinskaya in the 2020 Fed Cup qualifying round. Credit: Nuță Lucian

Should we have seen this coming? Of all the surprises in the top half of the 2024 Australian Open women’s draw, Anna Kalinskaya’s run to the quarter-finals stands as one of the biggest. The 25-year-old was ranked 75th entering the tournament, and she had never reached the third round of a major in 13 previous main-draw attempts.

Had we looked closely before the tournament, we wouldn’t have found a title contender, exactly, but we would have identified Kalinskaya as about as dangerous as a 75th-ranked player could possibly be. She finished 2023 on a 9-1 run, reaching the final at the WTA 125 in Tampico, then winning the title at the Midland 125, where she knocked out the up-and-coming Alycia Parks in the semi-finals. 2024 started well, too: The Russian upset top-tenner Barbora Krejcikova in Adelaide, then almost knocked out Daria Kasatkina in a two hour, 51-minute match two days later.

The only reason her official ranking is so low is that she missed nearly four months last summer to a leg injury that she picked up in the third round in Rome. Her two match wins at the Foro Italico pushed her up to 53rd in the world, just short of her career-best 51st, set in 2022. The Elo algorithm, which measures the quality of her wins rather than the number of tournaments she was healthy enough to play, reflects both her pre-injury successes and the more recent hot streak. Kalinskaya came to Melbourne as the 31st-ranked woman on the Elo list.

These alternative rankings put a different spin on her path through the Australian Open draw so far. Here are the results from her first four rounds, in which she appeared to be the underdog three times:

Don’t be fooled!

Elo has some adjustments to make:

Round  Opponent  Elo Rk  Elo vRk  
R16    Paolini       31       37  
R32    Stephens      31       50  
R64    Rus           31      107  
R128   Volynets      31      139

Kalinskaya was hardly an early favorite–Stephens did her the favor of taking out Kasatkina, and Anna Blinkova (who lost to Paolini) eliminated the third-seeded Elena Rybakina. But given how the draw worked out, seeing the Russian’s name in the quarter-finals wasn’t so unlikely after all.

More luck

Kalinskaya has a dangerous forehand and a solid backhand, but she isn’t an aggressive player by the standards of today’s circuit. Her 14 matches logged by the Match Charting Project average 4.2 strokes per point, and that skews low because it includes three meetings with Aryna Sabalenka. Yesterday’s fourth-round match against Paolini took 5.3 strokes per point, and the third-rounder with Stephens was similar.

By Aggression Score, the 25-year-old rates modestly below average, at -17 in rallies and -15 on returns. While she doesn’t have any weaknesses that prevent her from ending points earlier, she’s more comfortable letting the rally develop. When Paolini played along, the results were remarkable: 32 points reached seven shots or more yesterday, and Kalinskaya didn’t end any of them with an unforced error.

The downside of such a game style is that a lot of opponents won’t be so cooperative. Last fall, the Russian lost back-to-back-to-back matches against Ekaterina Alexandrova, Viktoria Hruncakova, and Ashlyn Krueger, three women who opt for big swings and short points. By contrast, consider the Rally Aggression Scores of the quartet Kalinskaya has faced in Melbourne:

Round  Opponent  AggScore  
R16    Paolini         -5  
R32    Stephens       -16  
R64    Rus            -59  
R128   Volynets       -38

Paolini and Stephens have roughly similar profiles to Kalinskaya’s own; Rus and Volynets are even more conservative.

This isn’t just a convenient narrative: Kalinskaya really is better against more passive players. She has played 118 career tour-level matches against women with at least 20 matches in the charting database. Sort them by Rally Aggression Score and separate them into four equal bins, and the Russian’s preferences become clear:

AggScore Range  Match Win%  
57 to 175            35.7%  
0 to 56              46.4%  
-27 to -1            50.0%  
-137 to -27          59.4%

If the whole tour were as patient as she is, the Russian would already be a household name.

Alas, it’s rare to draw four straight players as conservative as the bunch Kalinskaya has faced in Melbourne. And having reached the quarter-finals, her luck has run out. Her next opponent is Qinwen Zheng, who has a career Aggression Score of 27 and upped that number in 2023. It could be worse–fellow quarter-finalists Sabalenka and Dayana Yastremska are triple-digit aggressors–but it is a different sort of challenge than she has faced at the tournament so far.

To win tomorrow, Kalinskaya will need to play as well as she has for the last few months, only a couple of shots earlier in the rally. Otherwise, Zheng will end points on her own terms, and thousands of potential new fans will be convinced that Kalinskaya really is just the 75th best player in the world.

* * *

Why are upsets on the rise?

Only four seeds, and two of the top eight, survived to the Australian Open women’s quarter-finals. Many of the top seeds lost early. This feels like a trend, and it isn’t new.

One plausible explanation is that the field keeps getting stronger. Top-level players now develop all over the world, and coaching and training techniques continue to improve. There are few easy, guaranteed matches, even if Iga Swiatek and Aryna Sabalenka usually(!) make it look that way. I believe this is part of the story.

Another component, I suspect, is the shift in playing styles. I noted a couple of weeks ago when writing about Angelique Kerber is that WTA rally lengths have steadily declined in the last decade. In 2013, the typical point lasted 4.7 strokes; it’s now around 4.3. Shorter points are caused by more risk-taking. Risks don’t always work out, full-power shots go astray, and the better-on-paper player doesn’t always win.

In 2019, I tested a similar theory about men’s results. I split players in four quartiles based on Aggression Score and tallied the upset rate for every pair of player types. When two very aggressive players met, nearly 39% of matches resulted in upsets, compared to 25% when two very passive players met. The true gap isn’t quite that big: given the specific players involved, there should have been a few more upsets among the very aggressive group. But even after adjusting for that, it remained a substantial gap.

It stands to reason that the story would be the same for women. Instead of Aggression Score, I used average rally length. I doubt there’s much difference. I didn’t intend to change gears, I just got halfway through the project before checking what I did the first time.

The most aggressive quartile (1, in the table below) are players who average 3.6 shots per rally or less. The next group (2) ranges from 3.7 to 4.0, then (3) from 4.1 to 4.5, and finally (4) 4.6 strokes and up. The following table shows the frequency of upsets (Upset%) and how the upset rate compares to expectations (U/Exp) for each pair of groups:

Q1  Q2  Upset%  U/Exp  
1   1    40.7%   1.07  
2   1    36.2%   0.99  
2   2    35.7%   0.99  
3   1    35.1%   0.93  
3   2    35.5%   0.97  
3   3    40.9%   1.07  
4   1    37.6%   1.03  
4   2    36.6%   1.02  
4   3    34.6%   0.95  
4   4    34.7%   0.97

(If you look back to the 2019 study, you’ll notice that I did almost everything “backwards” this time — swapping 1 for 4 as the label for the most aggressive group, and calculating results as favorite winning percentages instead of upsets. Sorry about that.)

Matches between very aggressive players do, in fact, result in more upsets than expected. It’s not an overwhelming result, partly because it’s only 7% more than expected, and partly because matches between third-quartile players–those with average rally lengths between 4.1 and 4.5–are just as unexpectedly unpredictable.

I don’t know what to make of the latter finding. I can’t think of any reasonable cause for that other than chance, which casts some doubt on the top-line result as well.

If the upset rate for matches between very aggressive players is a persistent effect, it would give us more upsets on tour today than we saw a decade ago. An increasing number of players fit the hyper-aggressive mold, so there are more matchups between them. The logic seems sound to me, though it may be the case that other sources of player inconsistency outweigh a woman’s particular risk profile.

* * *

January 23, 1924: Debuts and dropshots

Men’s tennis ruled at the early Australian Championships. The tournament had been held since 1905 (as the “Australasian” Championships), but there was no women’s singles until 1922. On January 23rd, midway through the 1924 edition, the press corps was preoccupied with the severity of Gerald Patterson’s sprained ankle and the question of whether Ian McInnes had been practicing.

James O. Anderson, the 1922 singles champion who would win the 1924 edition as well, introduced what was then–at least to the Melbourne Argus–an on-court novelty:

He has developed a new stroke since he last played in Melbourne, and it has proved successful. On the back of the court he makes a pretence of sending in a hard drive, but with a delicate flick of the wrist he drops the ball just over the net, leaving his opponent helpless 30 feet away.

A veritable proto-Alcaraz, was James O.

For the few fans who weren’t solely focused on Australia’s Davis Cuppers, a superstar was emerging before their eyes. Also on the 23rd, 20-year-old Daphne Akhurst made quick work of Violet Mather, advancing to the semi-finals in her first appearance at the Championships.

Akhurst wouldn’t go any further, unable to withstand the heavy forehand of Esna Boyd in the next round. But it was nonetheless a remarkable debut: She won both the women’s and the mixed doubles titles. The correspondent for the Melbourne Age, recapping the mixed final, could hardly contain his admiration:

Miss Akhurst–an artist to her finger tips–belied her delicate mid-Victorian appearance that suggested that she had slipped out of one of Jane Austen’s books by sifting out cayenne pepper strokes from a never-failing supply.

Daphne and Jack Willard–“who ran for every ball, and continued running after he played the ball”–defeated Boyd and Gar Hone in straight sets.

The pair of championships was a harbinger of things to come. Between 1925 and 1931, Akhurst would win five singles titles (losing only in 1927 when she withdrew), four more in the women’s doubles, and another three mixed. The only thing that could stop her were the customs of the day: She married in 1930 and retired a year later. Tragically, she died from pregnancy complications in 1933, at the age of 29.

Daphne is best known these days as the name on the Australian Open women’s singles trophy. For the next several years, there will be many more Akhurst centennials to celebrate.

* * *

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Podcast Episode 97: Matt Futterman on the Australian Open and Sports With Fans

This week’s guest is Matt Futterman, reporter for the New York Times and author of Running to the Edge: A Band of Misfits and the Guru Who Unlocked the Secrets of Speed and Players: How Sports Became a Business.

Matt, who spent 15 days in hotel quarantine so that he could cover the Australian Open, talks about his time in isolation and what is was like to emerge into a semblance of normal life. He explains why sports aren’t really sports without fans, how close the Australian Open came to not happening, and why Sofia Kenin isn’t a bigger star.

I also take advantage of Matt’s extensive knowledge of distance running to ask whether the unique schedules of marathoners provide any insight into how tennis players can better manage the pandemic, how tennis pros can gain some of the benefits of being part of a team, and which active player would run the fastest marathon.

Thanks for listening!

(Note: this week’s episode is about 48 minutes long; in some browsers the audio player may display a different length. Sorry about that!)

Click to listen, subscribe on iTunes, or use our feed to get updates on your favorite podcast software.

Music: Everyone Has Gone Home by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2020. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: spinningmerkaba

Podcast housekeeping:

  • In case you haven’t heard, I’m one month into a short (~4 minutes) daily podcast called Expected Points. Here’s today’s episode.
  • The TAP book club will reconvene next week with our next selection, John Updike’s 1968 novel, Couples. Read along with us, share your thoughts, and suggest topics/questions/comments for our discussion in a future episode. (Yes, I know I said “next week” last week, too. This time I mean it. Probably.)

Hsieh, Errani, and a Match That Broke Everybody

In their third round match today at the Australian Open, Sara Errani and Su Wei Hsieh played 232 points. The fastest serve either one hit registered at 93 mph (149 kmh), Hsieh’s first serves averaged 85 mph, and Errani’s mean first serve speed was 75 mph. I use the word “mean” here as more than just a way to avoid saying “average” so many times.

The two veterans are crafty–dare I say tricky–players with an arsenal of weapons once the ball is in play. But the serve is mostly just a stumbling block to make the best of. Hsieh won 62 of her 115 return points, good for 54% of Errani’s serves. This is more impressive than it sounds–the Italian double faulted only four times today. It’s fairly common for a winner on the women’s tour to win more than half of her return points, but what makes this match so weird is that Errani did the same. She won 63 of her 117 return points, also a 54% clip.

About half of WTA losers fail to convert better than 50% of their service points. But only 2.4% of winners miss the mark. And there’s a huge gap between 50%–mediocre and survivable–and Hsieh’s 46%. A 46% rate of service points won translates to a 40% likelihood of holding. Coincidentally, that’s exactly what both players did, each hanging on to their service games in 6 of 15 tries.

I have the relevant stats for just under 25,000 tour-level, main draw women’s matches since 2010, and only about 80 winners–0.3%, or less than once per 300 contests–won service points at a lower clip than Hsieh did today.

** I say “about” because the stats I have from the early 2010s aren’t perfect. A match with 60% of return points won is a prime candidate to be a mistake. I checked these 80 for obvious errors, like matches with a small number of service breaks, but those numbers aren’t perfect either.

There’s no grand analytical insight to be gleaned from a match like this. It’s just a glorious oddity that reminds us how many different ways there are to win matches. (And to be honest, you only need to watch Hsieh for about 90 seconds to recognize that.) In that spirit, here’s some more trivia:

  • Since 2010, this is only the 12th Australian Open main draw match in which neither player won half of her service points.
  • The only AO match in which neither player won 46% of their service points was the 2018 third-rounder between Anett Kontaveit and Jelena Ostapenko. They both held about 45.5% of their points, and 68% of total games (17 of 25) were breaks.
  • There have been about 400 tour-level matches since 2010 in which neither player wins half of their service points. Before today, 21 of those involved Errani, and she won 17 of them.
  • The other players who have been involved in at least 12 such matches are Monica Niculescu (16), Alize Cornet (14), and Carla Suarez Navarro (13). Today was only Hsieh’s 5th appearance on the list.

Perhaps oddest of all, this the first time in four tries that Hsieh avoiding getting bageled by Errani. Last time they played, in Istanbul in 2017, the Italian won, 6-0 6-1, needing only 55 minutes and a total of 87 points. Errani was so on-form that day that she won a whopping 66% of her service points. Hsieh finally turned the tables, even if she still hasn’t figured out how to stop this dogged opponent from breaking her serve.

451 Games in 10 Days

When Margaret Court won her first major title at the 1960 Australian Championships, the wonder isn’t that she broke through as a 17 year-old. It’s that she remained standing at all.

The news coverage ahead of the final praised Court’s game and foresaw great things for her future, but it also predicted a win for her opponent, 18-year-old Jan Lehane, who had beaten Court 6-1 6-0 in the 1959 juniors final. While Court (then unmarried, playing as Margaret Smith) had posted a more recent win over her rival, the issue that led the pundits to favor Lehane was scheduling. Court had barely stepped off the court for two weeks.

That’s where my title comes from: A preview of the final claimed that the teenager had played 451 games in 10 days. Unlike Lehane, who entered only the adult singles event, Court played singles and doubles, as well as girls’ singles and doubles. She reached the finals in women’s doubles and girls’ singles, as well as the semi-final in junior doubles.*

** one news report claimed she reached three other finals, but I have a score from the girls’ doubles semi-final showing Court and her partner, Val Wicks, as the losers.

She lost her first two finals, including the junior singles to another future tour stalwart, Lesley Turner, which suggested that fatigue was a factor. Making matters worse, both of those championship matches went three sets.

451 games?

In those days, the Australian Championships were a more modest affair than the present-day Australian Open. The field was mostly Australian, though in 1960, two elite foreigners, Brazilian Maria Bueno and Britain’s Christine Truman, made the trip. Bueno and Truman won the doubles, while Bueno lost to Court in their singles quarter-final, and Lehane saw off Truman in the semis. Still, the singles draw was only five rounds.

Since early-round matches were often blowouts (Court won her opener 6-1 6-0), I struggled to come up with those 451 games. Here’s a quick rundown of Court’s known matches in the tournament:

Sum it up, and we have 292 games, plus the total from two more probable rounds of girls’ doubles. (It’s also conceivable that there is one more early round of junior singles, though it seems unlikely that the juniors draw would be bigger than the adult field.) But even in the pre-tiebreak era, a few doubles matches probably didn’t account for more than 150 games.

One event is not enough

Just like today, the top players of six decades ago carefully managed their schedules. For instance, they might play only doubles in the week before Wimbledon. But in January 1960, Court was not a top player, and her schedule was largely at the whim of her state federation.

For Australian juniors, the few days before the Championships were given over to the Wilson Cup, an interstate team event. (Boys played a parallel Linton Cup event.) The 1960 Wilson Cup was a Fed Cup-style round robin among six Australian states, with each tie consisting of two singles and one doubles match.

Court, representing Victoria, got her fair share of warmup matches. I’ve found results from three days of Wilson Cup play. (There were likely five rounds, partly because that is the logical number in a six-team round robin, partly because the first day of results I found are listed as the “third round.”) Here are Court’s results:

  • Jan 19th vs New South Wales: singles d. Lehane, 6-1 6-3; doubles loss to Lehane/Dawn Robberds, 6-3 6-2.
  • Jan 20th vs Tasmania: singles d. Gourlay, 6-0 6-0. (Court didn’t play the doubles rubber.)
  • Jan 21st vs South Australia: singles d. Felicity Harris, 6-0 6-0. (I didn’t find a doubles result, and several matches that day appear to have been unplayed or unfinished due to rain.)

That’s 57 more games. A post-Wilson Cup note reported that Court dropped only eight games in her singles matches. If she played one more match, that’s another 16 games (say, a 6-2 6-2 win); if she played two, it’s 28 (for instance, 6-0 6-1 and 6-3 6-0). It also seems likely that she participated in another doubles match or two. Wilson Cup play started on the 18th and the “third round” took place on the 19th, so it’s possible that she three or four matches on the first day alone.

A fortnight to remember

While I can’t account for all 451 games (plus 20 more in the women’s singles final), we do have records of Court playing 13 singles matches, almost definitely 14, and possibly 15. We have scores for 5 doubles matches, almost definitely 7, and possibly as many as 10. We can be confident of a total of at least 365 games, with several more scores unaccounted for. All of this happened between the opening of the Wilson Cup on January 18th and the adult singles finals on February 1st.

I have no idea if this is a record. One challenger immediately springs to mind: The John Isner–Nicolas Mahut match totaled 183 games, but Mahut lost his first-round doubles with another 46 games played. (Isner withdrew from doubles, and neither played mixed.)

Another contender is Martina Navratilova‘s 1986 Wimbledon campaign. As she tells it, rain forced her to play a whopping 17 matches in the second week alone. Yet despite reaching the finals in women’s singles, women’s doubles, and mixed doubles, she played “only” 333 games over the fortnight. (Her per-day rate in the second week might have surpassed Court’s.)

At least Court had the good sense not to enter mixed.

I don’t have a comprehensive doubles database, and junior records are even more sparse, so it’s not an easy record to confirm. A man, playing best-of-five in singles and (for many years) best-of-five in doubles, would be more likely to reach 400 or 500 games at a single major. It’s also possible that Navratilova tallied more games at a different major with fewer memorable scheduling problems; her 1986 effort easily cleared 300 games despite every match being settled in straight sets.

As for Court, she celebrated with a well-deserved break … of about one week. Within ten days, she was in New Zealand, where she lost to Ruia Morrison (a Maori tennis great, and a good story for another day) in another final. The national federation didn’t send her abroad that year, so she played a modest schedule for the remainder of the season. With our modern understanding of the importance of recovery, it seems like that was an excellent idea.

Another Slam, Another Pointless Serve Clock

Italian translation at settesei.it

The 25-second serve clock has quickly become a regular feature on the ATP and WTA tours. After a few trials, it made a debut in the run-up to last year’s US Open, and has become broadly accepted since. The US Open and Australian Open both used the countdown timer, and the WTA will employ the devices at 2019 Premier events, with an eye toward the full slate of tournaments in 2020.

As I understand it, the goal of the serve clock is twofold: First, to keep matches shorter by holding players to a standard time limit between points; and second, to enforce that time limit fairly. Tennis and broadcasting execs are always looking for ways to make matches shorter (or, at least, more predictable in length), so the first goal fits in with broader aims. The second is more specific. Many of the players best known for using a long time between points are big stars, and umpires were thought to be reluctant to penalize them. In theory, a standardized serve clock should make enforcement more transparent and ensure fairness.

The success of the second goal is difficult to assess. In one regard, it seems to be working, because we haven’t heard many players complaining about the system. Progress toward the first goal is much easier to judge, and I’ve done so three times: Once after the 2018 Rogers Cup, once after the joint event in Cincinnati, and a third time following the US Open. Each time, the conclusion was clear: The serve clock did not speed up play, and in many cases, it coincided with slower matches.

Count down under

The simplest way to measure the speed of a tennis match is to use the official match time and number of points played, then calculate the number of seconds per point. It’s a crude technique, since the official match time includes time spent playing, pauses between points, changeovers, heat breaks, medical time outs, challenges, and short rain delays. It’s imperfect. But the time spent on changeovers and the like is usually fairly consistent, making comparisons possible.

Here is the average seconds per point for men and women at the 2018 and 2019 Australian Open, reflecting the pace of play both before and after the introduction of the serve clock:

Year  Men Sec/Pt  Women Sec/Pt  
2018        40.2          40.4  
2019        41.0          40.3

This doesn’t exactly constitute a ringing endorsement of the serve clock. On average, matches were a bit slower in 2019 than in 2018. On the other hand, it’s a better result than the 2018 US Open, which was about 2.5 seconds slower than the 2017 pre-serve clock edition.

More precision, still rather slow

As I said, this is a crude way of measuring match speed. For most tournaments, it’s the best we can do without access to proprietary data that the ATP and WTA (presumably) possess. But at the majors, more detailed information is available. At the US Open, and at the Australian Open until 2017, that was the IBM “Slamtracker” data. The Australian Open no longer works with IBM, but it displays similar point-by-point data on its website.

Armed with better data, we can offer more precise estimates of how often players have exceeded the 25-second limit, both before and after the introduction of the serve clock. (Before the timer, the official limit at slams was 20 seconds, but I don’t think that a single time violation was assessed before at least 25 seconds–or more–had elapsed.) After the US Open last year, I found the number of times that players exceeded 25 seconds increased dramatically, as did the frequency that they went over 30 seconds. If you’re interested, went into more methodological detail in that article.

Again, the Australian Open fares better than its American counterpart, but that doesn’t exactly mean the clock is working, just that it isn’t dramatically slowing things down. Here are some figures from the 2017 and 2019 Australian Opens (I didn’t collect the relevant data last year), showing how often players violated the time limit both before and after the introduction of the timer:

Time Between   2017   2019  Change (%)  
under 20s     77.6%  75.9%       -2.2%  
under 25s     91.6%  91.8%        0.2%  
over 25s       8.4%   8.2%       -1.7%  
over 30s       2.8%   2.1%      -25.2%

The last row of this table is the first point I’ve seen that indicates the serve clock is working. Players are exceeding 30 seconds between points far less often than they did two years ago. On the other hand, there’s almost no difference in how often they cross the 25-second mark. And another negative: The “improved” figure of 2.1% of points over 30 seconds is considerably worse than the same rate in New York last year, which was a mere 0.8%. The clock has eliminated some of the most egregious offenses in Melbourne, but a lot more remain.

Carpenters, not tools

The main problem continues to be the way the serve clock is used. The countdown begins when the score is called, and umpires generally wait until crowd noise has subsided before making their announcement. Thus, after exciting shots or long rallies–the very points after which players have historically taken a long time to serve–the time limit is effectively extended. There’s simply no reason for this. Start the timer when the point is over, and if the crowd is still going wild 20 or 25 seconds later, make the appropriate adjustments. But many servers are already playing “to” the serve clock, using all the time they are allotted. The longer the umpire waits to start the clock, the longer all of us must wait until play resumes.

My primary complaint with delayed clock-starting, though, is a different one. Yes, I’d like matches to move along faster. But as with just about every line in the rulebook, the time limit ends up being extended for stars more than it is for journeymen. On a stadium court like Rod Laver Arena, a modest ovation follows nearly every point played, especially those won by a big name like Federer, Nadal, or Serena. Out on Court 20, Johanna Larsson can play a bruising rally and earn nothing more than a polite golf clap. The more anonymous the player, the less recovery time. After a couple of matches, that adds up. A rule designed to increase fairness and transparency shouldn’t work against unknowns, but in this case, at majors, it appears to do just that.

Eventually, I may stop writing about the serve clock. But as long as the tours are pushing an innovation that fails to meet its stated goals, I’ll keep auditing the results. Given a few more years, maybe they’ll get it right.