Category: Guest posts

The Rarity of Winning Two Titles at One Tournament

This is a guest post by Peter Wetz.

With all the drama in the tennis world right now–paradoxically despite the lack of official match results–a dry analytical article might be just what you need. And what better opportunity than quarantine to work through my long list of articles to write?

In June 2019, Feliciano Lopez had to complete five matches in two days. Not because he had to hop between tournaments as a 22-year-old Jo-Wilfried Tsonga did in 2007, but because Lopez went deep into both the singles and doubles draws on the grass courts at Queen’s Club, ultimately winning both titles.

Lopez won all four of his singles matches in the deciding set, and there was not much time to celebrate and recover after the final, because the doubles title match awaited. Partnering a rehabilitating Andy Murray seems to have been a sensible decision based on the fact that Murray’s most lopsided head-to-head of 11-0 is against Lopez. By doing so, Lopez could be guaranteed to avoid facing Murray in the doubles draw. An unusual strategy–and probably not his top consideration in choosing a partner–but it worked.

Lifting two trophies on finals day happens quite often at the Challenger tour, but is unusual on the main tour, where the best singles players often skip the doubles draw entirely. But how rare is it? And has it changed over the years? Longtime fans will immediately think of John McEnroe and his nearly equal tally of doubles titles (78) and singles titles (77). The modest title counts of Roger Federer (6) and Rafael Nadal (11) pale in comparison, even though the Spaniard is an exceptional doubles player.

Let’s take a look at the instances when a player won both trophies at the same tournament since 2005.

Year	Tournament	Player (Partner)
2005	Dusseldorf	Tommy Haas (Alexander Waske)
2005	Halle		Roger Federer (Yves Allegro)
2005	Basel		Fernando Gonzalez (Agustin Calleri)
2006	Vina del Mar	Jose Acasuso (Sebastian Prieto)
2007	Chennai		Xavier Malisse (Dick Norman)
2007	Delray Beach	Xavier Malisse (Hugo Armando)
2007	Munich		Philipp Kohlschreiber (Mikhail Youzhny)
2007	Dusseldorf	Agustin Calleri (Juan Ignacio Chela)
2008	Monte Carlo	Rafael Nadal (Tommy Robredo)
2008	Dusseldorf	Robin Soderling (Robert Lindstedt)
2009	Costa Do Sauipe	Tommy Robredo (Marcel Granollers)
2009	San Jose	Radek Stepanek (Tommy Haas)
2009	Newport		Rajeev Ram (Jordan Kerr)
2010	Memphis		Sam Querrey (John Isner)
2010	Marseille	Michael Llodra (Julien Benneteau)
2010	Bucharest	Juan Ignacio Chela (Lukasz Kubot)
2011	Tokyo		Andy Murray (Jamie Murray)
2012	Zagreb		Mikhail Youzhny (Marcos Baghdatis)
2013	Newport		Nicolas Mahut (Edouard Roger Vasselin)
2014	Newport		Lleyton Hewitt (Chris Guccione)
2017	Montpellier	Alexander Zverev (Mischa Zverev)
2018	Gstaad		Matteo Berrettini (Daniele Bracciali)
2019	London		Feliciano Lopez (Andy Murray)

Two things may catch one’s eye when looking at the list: First, since 2011 the double-title feat occurred slightly less than once per year. But before that it happened several times a year with the sole exception of 2006. Second, the only player who managed to win both titles at a Masters event is Nadal at Monte Carlo in 2008.

It is obvious, and a frequent topic of tennis hipster talk, that top singles players do not care as much about doubles anymore, certainly not as much as McEnroe and his peers did. One line of argument is that the way that modern doubles tennis has evolved to become more and more different from the singles game. In order to keep up with that, singles players would need to adapt their practice routine, which might detract from potential singles success. Long story short, the argument is that doubles became too “difficult” for singles players.

But let’s look at the numbers. The following graphs show the composition of draws since the year 2000. We see the percentage of players in singles draws, who also entered the doubles draw of the same tournament for three different categories (A = All, M = Masters, G = Grand Slams). The first graph shows the numbers for top 50 singles players and the second graph for top 10 singles players.

Percentage of top 50 players entering doubles draws per 5 years
Percentage of top 10 players entering doubles draws per 5 years

The first graph is not very dramatic, but it establishes that the habits of top 50 singles players have been quite steady over the past 20 years among all tournament categories. Since the year 2000, irrespective of event categories, between 41 and 47 percent of top 50 players entering a singles draw also entered the doubles draw of the same tournament.*

The second graph shows us that the numbers for top 10 players are a different story entirely. Ignoring tournament categories, the number of top 10 players participating in doubles draws has plummeted from 35 to 22 percent. While the numbers also decreased if we only look at Masters tournaments, it is interesting that it remains higher than the overall number. This can likely be explained by the fact that the prize money for doubles at Masters events is significantly higher than at regular tour events. Often the organizers of these tournaments also have the financial power to persuade top players to play doubles in order to–I am hypothesizing here–increase ticket sales or attendance in the early days of a tournament. See the Indian Wells Masters for instance, which is known for its stellar doubles draw every year.

The most drastic decline in doubles attendance by top 10 singles players can be seen at the Grand Slams, however. While in the period between the years 2000 and 2004 every fifth singles player took part in the doubles, in the past five years only one out of 183 singles entries also appeared in the doubles draw. The sole exception (of course!) was Dominic Thiem, who entered the 2016 US Open doubles competition ranked number 10 in singles with his countryman Tristan Samuel Weissborn.

As with many analyses it is difficult to provide a definitive answer to the question at hand. But the numbers help us to see the size of the effects and theorize about its causes. That doubles competition has become more and more specialized certainly has its validity. At the same time, the numbers also suggest that top singles players simply optimize for prize money, which means focusing on singles, not doubles. If there was a McEnroe-esque player on tour today (as Rafa might be), he just wouldn’t play enough doubles to win nearly 80 titles.

However, it is hard to tell which was first: The decline of singles players playing doubles due to reasons such as financial motivation (among possibly many others), or the players’ realization that they simply cannot keep up with the elite doubles competition? One thing may be for sure though: Had TennisTV already existed a few decades ago, it would have shown a lot more doubles than it does now.

—

* Note that there is the possibility that a few singles players might have been willing to enter the doubles draw of a tournament, but couldn’t, because their ranking was too low among other reasons. However, I think this affects the analysis only marginally, if at all.

—

Peter Wetz is a computer scientist interested in racket sports and data analytics based in Vienna, Austria.

How to (Partly) Fix the Davis Cup Finals

This is a guest post by Sébastien Rannaud.

There was plenty to criticize about the new-look Davis Cup Finals. Fans and pundits alike took aim at the atmosphere, the one-sided home support for Spain, the horrendous app and website, the lack of TV coverage, and the sleep-defying scheduling.

But perhaps the biggest controversy concerned something more arcane: Canada’s walkover in a dead doubles rubber against the United States. Why? The organizers gave the United States a double bagel win (6-0, 6-0) which padded their percentages in the Group F standings, thus increasing its chances of qualifying for the knockout stage as one of the two “best runners-up Nations” in round robin play.

To determine how the runners-up from each group are ranked against each other, the following order applies:

  1. Highest percentage of matches won
  2. Highest percentage of sets won
  3. Highest percentage of games won
  4. The Nations’ positions on the Davis Cup Rankings of the Monday of the week of the Finals

As you can see, that double bagel win for the US padded their stats in criteria #1 through #3.

Other tournaments, such as the ATP and WTA Finals use this criteria, but they don’t have walkovers, because they rely on substitute players in case of injury. The Davis Cup Finals is a different beast altogether, because of the “dead rubber” in round robin play. There are no incentives, sporting or financial, to play and win that match if you’ve already clinched your place in the quarter-finals, as Canada did before its doubles match against the US.

Odd constraints

This convoluted format is mainly due to two major factors. First, the Davis Cup Finals is comprised of 18 nations. Why use such a random number, when the knockout stage only involves eight nations? The only possible solution is to give wildcards to runner-up teams to complete the eight-team draw, hence the complicated tie-breaking procedure.

The second factor is that the tournament is played over a seven-day span. The organizers (Kosmos Group and ITF) would rather have a two-week timeslot for the event, but for now, seven days is the most they could get considering the not-so-ideal timeslot. If it is necessary to have three rounds in the knockout stage (quarter-finals, semi-finals, final), then you’re left with very limited round robin play, which explains the tiny three-team groups, playing only two ties each.

Such a small number of matches ensures that the tie breaking rules will come into play, making every match–including every doubles rubber–extremely important.  Therefore, when a team decides to forfeit its doubles match, rules need to be in place to ensure that the team benefitting from the walkover doesn’t have an unfair advantage over second-place teams from other groups.

Journalists, pundits and Twitter users have critiqued this major flaw in the format, but few have considered possible solutions. Let’s consider some of the adjustments that could be made and if they could work within the tournament’s constraints. 

The first solutions: Dead rubber tweaks

Let’s assume that the organizers would allow all dead rubbers to be skipped. In some cases, fans would buy tickets for only two matches, not three. The organizers would have to adjust the ticket prices somehow to reflect that likelihood, if they want to show fairness and respect to the ticket buyers.

Scenario A:

  • Same as current format (18 teams, 3-round knockout stage)
  • Dead rubber policy: walkover from clinching team. Winning team gets 1 point, but match does NOT count towards % of matches won, % of sets won, and % of games won

The team getting stomped on in the first two singles matches would not get the opportunity in the doubles match to make up for its bad percentages in the prior singles matches, while the winning team would be rewarded with keeping its near-perfect percentages. It is a system based on results, so it’d be difficult for a losing team to argue that it’s unfair to them, especially considering the fact that it gets to rest and go to bed earlier, on the eve of its do-or-die tie the next day against the other nation in the group.

Scenario B:

  • Same as current format (18 teams, 3-round knockout stage)
  • Dead rubber policy: walkover from clinching team. Winning team gets 1 point, but with a score of 6-4, 4-6, 6-4 counting towards % of matches won, % of sets won, and % of games won

Let’s say the two singles matches were lost in straight sets. The team benefitting from the walkover go from 0% of sets won to 29% of sets won. That seems reasonable and much less extreme that a 6-0, 6-0 score.

Scenario C:

  • Same as current format (18 teams, 3-round knockout stage)
  • Dead rubber policy: doubles match must be played. Bonus prize money ($100,000) will be given to the two players winning the match

We can assume that a clinching team would play its “second tier” players for the doubles rubber. These players would have a six-figure incentive to win the rubber–even at 4:00 AM–a serious motivation for doubles players who compete for smaller prize pools than singles players throughout the year. Because there would only be just a few dead rubbers each year, it wouldn’t be that much more costly for tournament organizers.

More solutions: 16 teams

Scenario D:

  • Round robin: 16 teams split into 4 groups; 3 ties played each
  • 8 teams qualify for knockout stage of 3 rounds (quarters, semis, final)
  • Dead rubber policy: winning team gets 1 point, but match does NOT count towards % of matches won, % of sets won, and % of games won

By playing three ties in the round robin stage, the dead rubber would likely only happen in the third tie, meaning teams would have already played between six and eight tennis matches (singles and doubles) before the dead rubber occurs. The weight of this forfeited match would be no more than one-seventh (14.2%) of the total matches played in the round robin stage. That’s less important than in the current round robin format of two ties, in which the forfeited match counts for one-sixth (16.7%). Moreover, by having groups of four nations, all four teams could play their ties at the same time, meaning that some teams would start the doubles rubber without knowing whether they had yet clinched their quarter-final spot.

Unfortunately, this scenario simply cannot work within the existing seven-day limit, because it would result in both finalists playing a total of six ties over seven days (or between 12 and 18 tennis matches). That is excessively grueling, especially for countries such as Canada and Russia, who essentially competed this year with two-man teams. That is simply not going to fly, especially for elites such as Nadal and Djokovic, who could have played up to five matches the previous week in the ATP Finals.

Scenario E:

  • Round robin: 16 teams split into 4 groups; 3 ties played each
  • 4 teams qualify for knockout stage of 2 rounds (semis, final)
  • Dead rubber policy: winning team gets 1 point, but match does NOT count towards % of matches won, % of sets won, and % of games won

By shortening the knockout stage, we get back to the much more palatable number of five ties in seven days. The upside is that the dead doubles rubber would be of even less importance that the prior scenario, since only the group winning teams would qualify for the knockout stage. The current tiebreaking procedure wouldn’t even matter since the group winning team would likely qualify on ties won and matches won alone.

Tradeoffs

However, solving one issue just raises others.

First, knockout ties are much more compelling for fans than round robin ties. In some cases, the last round robin tie has almost the same “do or die” quality as a quarter-finals tie, but on average, there is less drama. Which leads us to the second issue: teams ranked third or fourth in the group prior to the final round robin tie might already be mathematically eliminated from qualifying for the knockout stage. You could even end up with the third-place team and the fourth-place team playing each other in the last, meaningless “dead tie”–a new term for the tennis glossary that we can only hope never needs to be used. 

While a dead tie would be unlikely, the downside risk is enormous. It’s difficult to imagine how depressing this six-hour tie would feel in the stadium, especially in a neutral venue for both teams with few fans on-site. The ITF/Kosmos Group would be forced to assume that these teams would be professional enough to play the tie, at least in respect of the few hundred fans who show up. But even an 84-shot rally couldn’t salvage such a spectacle.

The only way to solve this would be to add incentives for teams stuck in these dead ties. In a 16-team tournament, you could give each runner-up team a direct entry for the following year’s Davis Cup Finals (in addition to the four group winning teams). Teams battling for third place in the group would be rewarded with the home court advantage in the March qualifying tie. Teams finishing last in the group would get the “away” tie in March or fall to a lower tier in the Davis Cup zone groups. With those incentives, the doubles rubber would usually retain some interest.

For the ITF and the Kosmos Group, cutting back from 18 to 16 teams would be much more complicated than tweaking the tiebreaker rules. With all the problems of this year’s Finals, the dead rubber policy probably isn’t on top of anyone’s to-do list. However, if they stay idle, more teams like Canada and Australia will exploit the loophole, and some day, a team will advance to the quarter-finals because of that double bagel win, leading to a public relations nightmare for the event organizers–not to mention a gut punch for the team that goes home early. 

Sport is only compelling so long as fans perceive an underlying level of fairness. The Davis Cup Finals narrowly skirted disaster this year, calling the format into question for attentive followers. Let’s hope that in the next 12 months, they figure out how to fix it.

—

Sébastien Rannaud is a pension actuary living in Montreal, Canada. You can find him on Twitter at @morggo.

The Big Four and Grand Slam Title Blocks

Italian translation at settesei.it

This is a guest post by Edoardo Salvati

In the last fifteen years, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Andy Murray—the Big Four—have dominated the ATP tour like no one before them. It’s hard to find a better example of oligarchy outside of geopolitics.

Since Wimbledon 2003, Federer’s first Grand Slam title, they have amassed 54 of 62 majors (or 87%) and been involved in another four finals. Similarly, since Federer’s first Masters win at Hamburg in 2002, they have won 106 of 159 titles at that level (or 66%) and contested 12 more finals. Since 2003 they have won 12 of 16 ATP Finals (or 75%) and contested one of the other four finals. 2017 and 2018 was the first time that outsiders won back-to-back season-ending titles in fifteen years.

It is an unprecedented level of domination that has left little glory for other players. But who are these others and how much would have they won had they been able to overcome the Big Four? At the Match Charting Project, we like to collect data (and you’re always welcome to contribute). Recently, we started working on a subset of matches that comprises all the Slam semi-finals back to 1980. Plenty of those featured recurring names from this second tier, so I was intrigued to see which players would have benefitted most in a world where the Big Four were not as good.

Deep inside of a parallel universe

Starting from Wimbledon 2003, I considered a hard-to-imagine scenario: What if the Big Four never won a major semi-final or final? For instance, when Grigor Dimitrov reached the final four at the 2017 Australian Open, he would have beaten Nadal (instead of losing in five sets), and then defeated Federer to win the title. When Juan Martin del Potro played Nadal in the 2018 French Open semi-final (he lost in straight sets), we rewrite history to make Delpo the winner, going on to face Dominic Thiem in the final. At the same event, in our parallel universe, Thiem wins the final against Nadal (he really lost in straight sets) and becomes the French Open champion for a second theoretical time.

The resulting slam tallies aren’t a precise redistribution of some of the Slams won by the Big Four, because there can be two different parallel-universe winners for the same tournament. Nevertheless, the title and final counts provide a general idea of who would’ve thrived in a Big Four-less sport. The following table lists the additional titles and finals (to a player’s actual wins, not shown) belonging to a parallel universe of tennis. 

Player                 Extra Slams              Extra Finals      
Stan Wawrinka          6 (2 AO - 2 FO - 2 US)   0                 
David Ferrer           6 (2 AO - 2 FO - 2 US)   0                 
Andy Roddick           5 (1 AO - 3 WIM - 1 US)  2 (1AO - 1 WIM)   
Jo Wilfried Tsonga     4 (2 AO - 2 WIM)         0                 
Tomas Berdych          3 (1 AO - 1 FO - 1 US)   2 (WIM)           
Richard Gasquet        3 (2 WIM - 2 US)         0                 
Milos Raonic           3 (1 AO - 2 WIM)         0                 
Juan Martin del Potro  2 (1 WIM - 1 US)         3 (2 FO - 1 US)   
Marin Cilic            2 (1 AO - 1 WIM)         2 (1 AO - 1 US)   
Nicolay Davydenko      2 (1 FO - 1 US)          1 (US)            
Dominic Thiem          2 (FO)                   1 (FO)            
Marat Safin            2 (1 AO - 1 WIM)         0                 
Marcos Baghdatis       2 (1 AO - 1 WIM)         0                 
Robin Soderling        2 (FO)                   0                 
Kevin Anderson         2 (1 WIM - 1 US)         0                 
Grigor Dimitrov        2 (1 AO - 1 WIM)         0                 
Lleyton Hewitt         1 (US)                   2 (1 WIM - 1 US)  
Gael Monfils           1 (FO)                   1 (US)                       
Mark Philippoussis     1 (WIM)                  0                 
Andre Agassi           1 (US)                   0                 
Fernando Gonzalez      1 (AO)                   0                 
Jonas Bjorkman         1 (WIM)                  0                 
Mariano Puerta         1 (FO)                   0                 
Ivan Ljubicic          1 (FO)                   0                 
Rainer Schuettler      1 (WIM)                  0                 
Fernando Verdasco      1 (AO)                   0                 
Mikhail Youznhy        1 (US)                   0                 
Ernests Gulbis         1 (FO)                   0                 
Jerzy Janowicz         1 (WIM)                  0  
Kei Nishikori          0                        1 (US)                
Juan Carlos Ferrero    0                        1 (AO)            
Sebastian Grosjean     0                        1 (WIM)           
Tim Henman             0                        1 (US)            
Nicolas Kiefer         0                        1 (AO)            
David Nalbandian       0                        1 (FO)            
Tommy Haas             0                        1 (WIM)           
Hyeon Chung            0                        1 (AO)            
Jurgen Melzer          0                        1 (FO)            
Total                  62                       23

It’s no surprise to see Stan Wawrinka, a three-time winner and nine-time major semi-finalist, at the top. He would triple his overall count for each Slam he won, though Wimbledon would remain elusive. Had he beaten Federer in the quarter-final in 2014, he would have gotten as far as the semi-final against Milos Raonic.

There’s a group of players whose careers would look even more outstanding. David Ferrer, Jo Wilfried Tsonga, Tomas Berdych, Richard Gasquet and Raonic could all claim to be Slam winners. Ferrer lost all his semi-finals and a final to the Big Four, and winning a Slam would have been a fitting reward for his many years of elite-level performance.

And, of course, there’s Andy Roddick, who must have wished that the only illustrious citizen from Basel was Jacob Bernoulli. After winning the US Open in 2003, Roddick lost all the finals he played to Federer, including three Wimbledon Championships. 

One player who may deserve to be even higher on the list is del Potro, who had to face a member of the Big Four in every semi-final he played and never went beyond the quarter-finals at the Australian Open, twice knocked out by Federer. You would expect del Potro to have won more than two of these hypothetical majors.

The gatekeeper

A few years ago, in an article for FiveThirtyEight, Carl Bialik investigated the assumption that Nadal led all the Open-era greats as the biggest obstacle to Grand Slam titles. Inventing a stat called the “title block,” he quantified every loss to Nadal with a fraction of the title depending on the round: half a title block for a loss to Nadal in the finals, a quarter for the semi-finals, and so on. 

Let’s use that stat and extend the analysis to see how many titles, since Wimbledon 2003, the Big Four cost the other players, as shown in the following table. Walkovers and retirements were included. 

Blocked                  AO    RG   WIM   USO  Titles Cost  
Roger Federer          2.00  2.50  1.50  1.00         7.00  
Andy Murray            2.94  1.25  1.38  0.88         6.44  
Novak Djokovic         0.06  2.13  1.00  2.50         5.69  
Rafael Nadal           1.13  0.13  1.75  0.75         3.75  
Andy Roddick           0.50  0.00  1.78  0.88         3.16  
Tomas Berdych          1.03  0.19  1.31  0.25         2.78  
David Ferrer           0.88  1.13  0.13  0.51         2.63  
Stanislas Wawrinka     0.72  1.00  0.19  0.63         2.53  
Juan Martin Del Potro  0.25  0.70  0.45  1.03         2.43  
Marin Cilic            0.81  0.09  0.94  0.44         2.28  
Jo Wilfried Tsonga     0.94  0.19  0.81  0.34         2.28  
Lleyton Hewitt         0.25  0.19  0.56  0.78         1.78  
Milos Raonic           0.56  0.13  0.88  0.06         1.63  
Robin Soderling        0.00  1.13  0.23  0.25         1.62  
Richard Gasquet        0.03  0.38  0.63  0.41         1.46  
Gael Monfils           0.11  0.75  0.00  0.57         1.43  
Kevin Anderson         0.07  0.00  0.64  0.50         1.21  
Dominic Thiem          0.00  1.02  0.00  0.13         1.14  
Marcos Baghdatis       0.64  0.03  0.44  0.02         1.13  
Nikolay Davydenko      0.27  0.25  0.01  0.53         1.05  
Fernando Gonzalez      0.56  0.17  0.13  0.16         1.02  
Fernando Verdasco      0.30  0.25  0.13  0.28         0.96  
Kei Nishikori          0.38  0.20  0.13  0.25         0.96  
Mikhail Youzhny        0.05  0.06  0.41  0.42         0.95  
Grigor Dimitrov        0.47  0.03  0.31  0.06         0.88  
Marat Safin            0.53  0.00  0.28  0.00         0.81  
Andre Agassi           0.13  0.00  0.03  0.63         0.78  
Tommy Haas             0.11  0.22  0.41  0.00         0.73  
Tommy Robredo          0.19  0.13  0.11  0.25         0.67  
Feliciano Lopez        0.11  0.01  0.19  0.34         0.65  
Gilles Simon           0.30  0.06  0.19  0.03         0.58  
Juan Carlos Ferrero    0.25  0.00  0.32  0.00         0.57  
David Nalbandian       0.13  0.25  0.03  0.16         0.56  
Jurgen Melzer          0.10  0.25  0.06  0.09         0.51  
Mark Philippoussis     0.00  0.00  0.50  0.01         0.51  
Mariano Puerta         0.00  0.50  0.00  0.00         0.50  
Nicolas Almagro        0.06  0.41  0.00  0.03         0.50

As expected, the Big Four have blocked each other more than they have any other player, costing themselves a whopping 22.88 majors, with Federer and Murray paying the highest price, 7.00 and 6.44 respectively. Other familiar names are just below the top four. There are 17 players who were blocked from at least one major title.

Nadal retains his status as the Slam gatekeeper: you have to pass through him to win a major. Not only did the rest of the Big Four fails to block him as much as he did them–he has the lowest major titles cost among the Big Four at 3.75–but he also has blocked the rest of the quartet more than any other player.     

Blocker         Blocked         Titles cost  
Rafael Nadal    Roger Federer          3.75  
Rafael Nadal    Novak Djokovic         3.13  
Rafael Nadal    Andy Murray            1.44  
Total                                  8.32  
                                             
Novak Djokovic  Andy Murray            3.13  
Novak Djokovic  Roger Federer          3.00  
Novak Djokovic  Rafael Nadal           1.88  
Total                                  8.01  
                                             
Roger Federer   Andy Murray            1.88  
Roger Federer   Novak Djokovic         1.56  
Roger Federer   Rafael Nadal           1.50  
Total                                  4.94  
                                             
Andy Murray     Novak Djokovic         1.00  
Andy Murray     Rafael Nadal           0.38  
Andy Murray     Roger Federer          0.25  
Total                                  1.63

Nadal boasts a net credit of 2.25 major titles versus Federer, of 1.25 against Djokovic and of 1.06 compared to Murray. Just as the rest of the men’s tour would prefer that the Big Four had pursued a different sport, three-quarters of the Big Four have had plenty of reasons to wish that Rafa had shifted his focus to golf.

At this month’s Australian Open, Nadal continues to loom large. With the No. 2 seed, he is a potential semi-final opponent for Federer or Murray and, of course, a possible foe in the final for top seed Djokovic. There’s no guarantee that Nadal will stand in anyone’s way, but with these men accounting for the top three seeds at yet another major, the era of Big Four title blocks is far from over.

—

Edoardo Salvati is on a mission to raise the level of the Italian sports conversation. He founded settesei.it and has written about tennis and other sports for publications such as Contrasti, Undici, Il Tennis Italiano. He is a prolific and proud contributor to the Match Charting Project.

Jürgen Melzer and Singles Players Who Care About Doubles

This is a guest post by Peter Wetz.

Italian translation at settesei.it

Three weeks ago, Jürgen Melzer played his last singles tournament on home turf at the Erste Bank Open in Vienna. His low singles ranking, caused by injury setbacks and a mediocre comeback campaign, required him to enter into the tournament as a wild card. Melzer drew Milos Raonic in the first round; bookmakers and fans alike predicted that this would be Melzer’s last singles match.

However, things went differently. In front of a packed arena (at least by tournament-Monday standards) Melzer squeezed out a two set win to face Kevin Anderson in the round of 16. That match never happened, though, after a suddenly occurring gastritis forced him to withdraw. As weird as it sounds, this means that Melzer did not lose the last match of his singles career, a feat only a few players can put on their CV.

Another unique thing about Melzer is that he is one of the last players to reach an elite level in singles as well as in doubles. To underline this characteristic let’s start by looking at singles (ChS) and doubles (ChD) career high rankings of  recently-retired1 top ten singles players. The following table shows each player’s peak singles and doubles rankings, sorted by the date at which each player recorded their best singles ranking:

Player			ChS	ChS Date  ChD	ChD Date
Paradorn Srichaphan	9	2003-05	  79	2003-09
Juan Carlos Ferrero	1	2003-09	  198	2003-02
Andy Roddick		1	2003-11	  50	2010-01
Rainer Schuettler	5	2004-04	  40	2005-07
Guillermo Coria		3	2004-05	  183	2004-03
Nicolas Massu		9	2004-09	  31	2005-07
Joachim Johansson	9	2005-02	  108	2005-09
Gaston Gaudio		5	2005-04	  78	2004-06
Guillermo Canas		8	2005-06	  47	2002-07
Mariano Puerta		9	2005-08	  68	1999-08
David Nalbandian	3	2006-03	  105	2009-10
Ivan Ljubicic		3	2006-05	  70	2005-05
Mario Ancic		7	2006-07	  47	2004-06
Radek Stepanek		8	2006-07	  4	2012-11
Nikolay Davydenko	3	2006-11	  31	2005-06
James Blake		4	2006-11	  31	2003-03
Fernando Gonzalez	5	2007-01	  25	2005-07
Robin Soderling		4	2010-11	  109	2009-05
Jürgen Melzer           8       2011-04   6     2010-10
Nicolas Almagro		9	2011-05	  48	2011-03
Mardy Fish		7	2011-08	  14	2009-07
Janko Tipsarevic	8	2012-04	  46	2011-04
Juan Monaco		10	2012-07	  41	2009-01

The data shows that top ten singles players rarely climb up to the very top in doubles. Of course, there can be several reasons for this: scheduling (playing a full singles schedule can be exhausting) or skill (being a good singles player doesn’t necessarily mean that you are also a good doubles player), among others. The fact that the best doubles career high ranking by the Big Four is Roger Federer’s rank of 24 reached in 2003 further underlines that top singles players have better things to do than practicing their volleying skills.

So, as the table above already suggests, Melzer is one of the last of the breed of players that–ranking-wise–made it until the very top in both singles and doubles. The following table shows players who reached a top-ten career high in both rankings, sorted by when they achieved their high in doubles back until 1990.

Player		    ChS	ChS Date   ChD	ChD Date
Petr Korda	    2	1998-02	   10	1990-06
Michael Stich	    2	1993-11	   9	1991-03
Marc Rosset	    9	1995-09	   8	1992-11
Yevgeny Kafelnikov  1	1999-05	   4	1998-03
Patrick Rafter	    1	1999-07	   6	1999-02
Wayne Ferreira	    6	1995-05	   9	2001-03
Jiri Novak	    5	2002-10	   6	2001-07
Jonas Björkman	    4	1997-11	   1	2001-07
Arnaud Clement	    10	2001-04	   8	2008-01
Jürgen Melzer	    8	2011-04	   6	2010-10
Radek Stepanek	    8	2006-07	   4	2012-11
Fernando Verdasco*  7	2009-04	   8	2013-11
Jack Sock*	    8	2017-11	   2	2018-09

* Active singles player

Since 1990 there have only been 13 players who reached a doubles and singles career high inside the top ten. The last number one with a top ten doubles ranking was Patrick Rafter. Currently there are only two active singles players part of this group. As has already been mentioned on this blog several times, Jack Sock’s doubles prowess is an exception no matter how you look at it. And the time between Fernando Verdasco’s singles high and doubles high shows that he reached them at two completely different stages of his career, which brings us to the final measure: Which players held a top ten spot in both rankings at the same time? The following table shows players, weeks spent in the singles top ten (weeksS), weeks spent in the doubles top ten (weeksD) and weeks spent in both singles and doubles top ten at the same time (weeksS+D) sorted by the date the doubles career high was reached.

Player		weeksS	weeksD	weeksS+D Chd Date
John Mcenroe	208	96	74	 1983-01
Pat Cash	89	14	5	 1984-08
Anders Jarryd	82	379	78	 1985-08
Mats Wilander	227	72	72	 1985-10
Stefan Edberg	452	122	117	 1986-06
Guy Forget	79	119	5	 1986-08
Yannick Noah	157	87	84	 1986-08
Andres Gomez	143	62	31	 1986-09
Boris Becker	530	21	21	 1986-09
Joakim Nystrom	72	57	33	 1986-11
Miloslav Mecir	109	19	19	 1988-03
Emilio Sanchez	57	138	44	 1989-04
Jakob Hlasek	37	132	10	 1989-11
Yevgeny Kafeln.	388	157	148	 1998-03
Patrick Rafter	156	33	26	 1999-02
Jonas Björkman	43	462	29	 2001-07
Jürgen Melzer	14	50	14	 2010-09

With Melzer’s retirement, there is no active player who held a top ten ranking in singles and doubles at the same week. In other words, he is the last player who held simultaneous top ten rankings in singles and doubles. With Jonas Björkman this makes him one of only two players in this group for the past 18 years! Even in the nineties there were only two players–Rafter and Yevgeny Kafelnikov–reaching this feat, whereas in the eighties there were many others.

Even if this stream of trivia does not tell us much analytically, we can see that players peaking with and without partners on their side of the court are becoming a rare species. The times when they have done so simultaneously are long gone.

Footnotes

1. We look at retired players, because their career high rankings are not subject to change anymore.

—

Peter Wetz is a computer scientist interested in racket sports and data analytics based in Vienna, Austria.

Dominating Your Countrymen

This is a guest post by Peter Wetz.

Italian translation at settesei.it

When Andy Murray lost to fellow Brit Kyle Edmund at the 2018 Eastbourne International, The Sunday Times headlined that this was Andy’s first loss to a countryman in twelve years. Indeed, twelve years is a long time, and not too many readers will remember his round of 32 loss against Tim Henman in 2006 at the Thailand Open.

However, if you don’t play often against players from your country, twelve years may feel much shorter. Indeed, between his losses in 2006 and 2018 Andy only played and won four matches against other Britons. From October 2006 to June 2016 there was not even a single match Andy had to play against one of his countrymen. Out of the five matches since his loss in 2006, he won four. Doesn’t look that impressive anymore.

So who are the players that really dominated foes holding the passport? First, let’s look at the longest winning streaks in terms of matches. The list shows players who amassed at least a 10-match winning streak against players from their country, since 1991. Matches that were not completed due to retirements or walkovers are ignored.

Player		Start		End		Matches
Pete Sampras	1993-03		1994-05		34
Pete Sampras	1995-12		1997-02		23
Rafael Nadal	2004-08		2005-10		22
Sergi Bruguera	1993-09		1995-07		20
Rafael Nadal	2008-05		2010-05		19
Sergi Bruguera	1992-04		1993-07		19
Andy Roddick	2006-07		2009-08		18
Guillermo Coria	2002-08		2004-05		18
Stefan Edberg	1991-07		1994-02		18
Andre Agassi	2000-01		2001-08		17
James Blake	2006-02		2007-07		16
Juan C. Ferrero	2002-09		2004-04		16
Rafael Nadal	2012-05		2013-10		15
Carlos Moya	2004-01		2005-01		15
Tomas Berdych	2006-06		2017-01		14*
John Isner	2013-04		2014-07		13
Rafael Nadal	2011-03		2012-04		13
Roger Federer	2009-08		2013-03		13
Andre Agassi	2004-08		2006-03		12
Juan C. Ferrero	2000-02		2001-04		12
Magnus Larsson	1996-04		1999-08		12
Rafael Nadal	2016-02		2018-04		11*
David Ferrer	2011-07		2012-04		11
Novak Djokovic	2008-06		2011-11		11
Andy Roddick	2003-06		2004-03		11
R. Schuettler	2000-08		2003-08		11
Lleyton Hewitt	1999-06		2001-05		11
Y. Kafelnikov	1995-03		2000-10		11
Carlos Costa	1993-07		1994-04		11
Renzo Furlan	1991-03		1994-08		11

* Active streaks of active players

Three players, Pete Sampras, Rafael Nadal and Sergi Bruguera, each with multiple entries, stick out on top of the list. Coming from countries that are known for regularly having players at the top of the rankings, these streaks look even more impressive. Obviously, Pete Sampras, for instance, often got the opportunity to play against other Americans. Hence, when he was at the peak of his career, he could pile up wins for his streak count over a short amount of time–as long as he kept defeating formidable opponents such as Andre Agassi, Jim Courier, and Michael Chang.

What if we relax the number of matches contributing to the streak and take a look at the temporal duration of a streak? The list shows all winning streaks against players from the same country lasting 36 months or longer and consisting of four or more matches. The third column shows the duration of the streak in months, the fourth column shows how many matches per month were played during the streak–to give an indication of how regularly the player faced a fellow–and the last column shows how many matches contribute to the streak.

Player		Start		Dur	M/Mon	Matches
Tomas Berdych	2006-06		127	0.11	14*
Jurgen Melzer	2003-07		87	0.07	6
Juan MD Potro	2009-02		85	0.08	7
Thomas Muster	1991-06		83	0.12	10
Tim Henman	1999-03		74	0.09	7
Novak Djokovic	2012-06		70	0.07	5*
Roger Federer	2000-05		69	0.12	8
Milos Raonic	2012-05		69	0.06	4
Y. Kafelnikov	1995-03		67	0.16	11
Lleyton Hewitt	2009-02		65	0.09	6
David Goffin	2012-01		63	0.06	4*
F. Volandri	2003-09		58	0.1	6
Dominik Hrbaty	2000-10		57	0.07	4
Kevin Kim	2000-08		53	0.08	4
Lleyton Hewitt	2001-11		51	0.08	4
Steve Darcis	2008-06		50	0.1	5
A. Chesnokov	1991-04		47	0.11	5
Gustavo Kuerten	1997-04		46	0.11	5
R. Krajicek	1992-06		44	0.23	10
Roger Federer	2009-08		43	0.3	13
Novak Djokovic	2008-06		41	0.27	11
Renzo Furlan	1991-03		41	0.27	11
Magnus Larsson	1996-04		40	0.3	12
Marcos Ondruska	1994-03		40	0.1	4
Andy Roddick	2006-07		36	0.5	18
R. Schuettler	2000-08		36	0.31	11
Tommy Haas	2009-06		36	0.19	7
F. Gonzalez	2006-08		36	0.14	5
H. Zeballos	2014-02		36	0.11	4

* Active streaks of active players

(Andy Murray’s streak is not on this list, because we define the duration of a streak as the time between the first and last match satisfying the condition of the streak, in this case winning matches against countrymen. In his case these dates are June and October 2016 making his streak just short of four months.)

Tomas Berdych comes out on top of the list with a huge gap over the second-place Jurgen Melzer. Berdych’s still active streak of winning against countrymen started more than twelve years ago (the duration of the streak is not exactly that long, because currently the streak stops at his last completed match win which was against Jiri Vesely in January 2017). The streak currently consists of 14 match wins with a relatively low rate of matches per month (0.11).

All of the players who topped the former list don’t qualify for this one, because their streaks, while spanning large numbers of matches, didn’t last as many years as the latter accomplishments. However, two members of the big four, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic appear. The case of Roger Federer is special in that since 2005 out of 26 matches, he only faced two different opponents. Of these 26 matches, he faced Stan Wawrinka 24 times and Marco Chiudinelli twice. His streak starting in 2009 essentially represents his head-to-head against Wawrinka over this period of time. Fun fact: David Goffin is the only player from this list who still has a clean sheet and never lost a match against another Belgian on the ATP tour.

Aside from the current streak of Tomas Berdych, the lack of long active streaks shows us that there are no countries where one player has been dominating everyone else over the past few years. Even the top guys occasionally lose when facing an opponent from the same nation. There’s only one way to reliably avoid losing to a countryman: As Marcos Baghdatis, Grigor Dimitrov, or Kevin Anderson can tell you, the trick is to hail from a nation with no other top-level competition at all.

—

Peter Wetz is a computer scientist interested in racket sports and data analytics based in Vienna, Austria.

Men’s Doubles Season Starts and the Case of Oliver Marach and Mate Pavic

This is a guest post by Peter Wetz.

In recent years, the steady decline of the holders of 116 doubles titles–Bob and Mike Bryan–has resulted in more variety at the very top of the game. The 16-time Grand Slam champions won their last major at the US Open 2014. Since then, eight different teams have won their first title at the highest level of the sport.

Even though none of these debut winners emerged out of nowhere, the doubles team consisting of Oliver Marach and Mate Pavic, which formed in the middle of last season, has enjoyed an exceptional run at this year’s start of the season. This prompted me to take a closer look at the performance of doubles teams per season.

The following table shows each team’s won-loss record through the French Open for each season since 2000 . It’s sorted by number of  wins up to that point, and the last column displays the won-loss record for the complete season. Only teams that have won more than 30 matches until the French Open are listed.

Year	Team		W-L (%) Start	W-L (%) Full
2013	Bryan/Bryan	40-4  (91%)	71-11 (87%)
2002	Knowles/Nestor	38-7  (84%)	66-14 (82%)
2007	Bryan/Bryan	37-5  (88%)	73-10 (88%)
2008	Bryan/Bryan	37-9  (80%)	63-17 (79%)
2009	Bryan/Bryan	37-9  (80%)	68-18 (79%)
2014	Bryan/Bryan	36-6  (86%)	64-12 (84%)
2018	Marach/Pavic	36-7  (84%)	tbd
2010	Nestor/Zimonjic	35-7  (83%)	57-19 (75%)
2012	Mirnyi/Nestor	34-9  (79%)	43-18 (70%)
2003	Knowles/Nestor	34-9  (79%)	57-16 (78%)
2006	Bryan/Bryan	33-9  (79%)	65-15 (81%)
2004	Bryan/Bryan	32-8  (80%)	57-17 (77%)
2010	Bryan/Bryan	31-7  (82%)	67-13 (84%)
2011	Bryan/Bryan	31-7  (82%)	59-16 (79%)
2009	Nestor/Zimonjic	31-8  (79%)	57-17 (77%)
2014	Nestor/Zimonjic	31-8  (79%)	42-18 (70%)
2003	Bryan/Bryan	31-12 (72%)	54-20 (73%)

As we can see, Marach/Pavic come in seventh with a very healthy 36-7 won-loss record this year. Their first loss came in the Rotterdam final, their fourth tournament after collecting titles in Doha, Auckland, and at the Australian Open–a streak of 17 consecutive match wins. If we ignore the all-time greats, there hasn’t been a better start to a men’s doubles season in the past 16 years.

The fact that the Bryan twins show up ten out of seventeen times in the table underlines just how dominant they were. And even though they did not win a Grand Slam in the last three years, they still had the best season starts in 2015 and 2016 (just barely missing the table, because they did not reach 30 match wins).

The last column gives a clue of what to expect from Marach and Pavic for the rest of the year. Most of the time, the teams at the very top only slightly decline. Notably, in 2007 the Bryan brothers maintained a win percentage of 88%, which led to the best doubles season in the dataset, measured by won-loss record.

After losing their seventh match this season at the 2018 French Open final to Herbert/Mahut and therefore missing the chance to win the first two majors of the season–a feat achieved in the open era only by the Bryans in 2013–it will be interesting to see if they will be able to sustain their level over a full season.

—

Peter Wetz is a computer scientist interested in racket sports and data analytics based in Vienna, Austria.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Marco Cecchinato’s Run to the Roland Garros Semifinal

This is a guest post by Peter Wetz.

When a 25 year old Italian tennis player named Marco Cecchinato defeated Marius Copil in the first round of this year’s edition of Roland Garros, some people may have noticed that it was one of the longer first round matches. With a duration of 3 hours and 41 minutes the match was the fifth longest of the 64 opening round matches. However, I am confident that no one suspected the winner of this encounter would go much farther in the draw. Little did we know.

After his unexpected four set win in the quarterfinal against a hard-fighting Novak Djokovic–bookmakers were giving him about an 11 percent chance of winning–many tweets emphasized the uniqueness of this achievement. Since it is difficult to provide more context in a tweet, I was interested in just how often something like this happened in the past. So I looked into the data and came up with more complete lists of the tweeted facts which are presented in the remainder of this post.

The first and obvious question is, when was the last time that a player ranked as high as Cecchinato reached a Grand Slam semifinal?

The following table shows players ranked outside of the top-70 that reached a Grand Slam semifinal. Rows denoting achievements at Roland Garros are bold.

Tourney Player		       Rank	Round
RG 18	Marco Cecchinato	 72	SF
W  08	Rainer Schuettler	 94	SF
W  08	Marat Safin		 75	SF
AO 04	Marat Safin		 86	F
W  01	Goran Ivanisevic	125	W
W  00	Vladimir Voltchkov	237	SF
RG 99	Andrei Medvedev		100	F
AO 99	Nicolas Lapentti	 91	SF
AO 98	Nicolas Escude		 81	SF
W  97	Michael Stich		 88	SF
RG 97	Filip Dewulf		122	SF
RG 92	Henri Leconte		200	SF
UO 91	Jimmy Connors		174	SF
AO 91	Patrick Mcenroe		114	SF

As the tweet points out the most recent comparable runs by Rainer Schuettler and Marat Safin happened after the players have reached top-10 rankings. Hence, the most recent really comparable run where the player has not reached his career high ranking at the time of the tournament, is by Vladimir Voltchkov, who reached the semifinal at Wimbledon 2000.*

Another unique thing about Cecchinato’s run is that until last week he did not win a single match at a Grand Slam event.

The following table shows players that won their first match at a Grand Slam event and went on to win more matches. To prevent showing an extremely short table, I relaxed the condition on how far the player should have gone when winning his first Grand Slam match to reaching the quarterfinal. The last column Attempts denotes the number of main draw appearances until his first main draw win.

Tourney   Player	   Rank    Reached Attempts
RG 18	  Marco Cecchinato   72	   SF	   6
AO 18     Tennys Sandgren    97	   QF	   3
RG 03	  Martin Verkerk     46	   F	   3
W  00     Alexander Popp    114	   QF	   2
W  97	  Nicolas Kiefer     98	   QF	   3
RG 97	  Galo Blanco	    111	   QF	   4
W  96	  Alex Radulescu     91	   QF	   1
RG 95	  Albert Costa	     36	   QF	   4
RG 94     Hendrik Dreekmann  89	   QF	   2
AO 93	  Brett Steven	     71	   QF	   1

As the table shows, rarely has a player gotten past the quarterfinal after recording his debut win at a Grand Slam, with the notable exception of Martin Verkerk, who reached the final 15 years ago at his third attempt. Still–especially in the 1990s–there were a few players who won four consecutive matches. Not included in the table, but not less impressive, is the run by Mikael Pernfors. Interestingly, he had not won a single Grand Slam match, but he had built himself a ranking of 26, when he reached the final round of Roland Garros 1986, where he also won his first main draw match.

When looking at male Grand Slam competitors from Italy, not many names besides Fabio Fognini, Andreas Seppi, Simone Bolelli, and Paolo Lorenzi spring to mind. With 150 main draw appearances, the quartet shares a mere ten appearances in the round of 16 and one quarterfinal appearance (Fabio Fognini at Roland Garros 2011). Marco Cecchinato is the first Italian player in the semifinal of a Grand Slam in 40 years.

The following table shows all appearances of Italian players past the round of 16.

Tourney   Player	    	Reached
RG 18	  Marco Cecchinato  	SF
RG 11	  Fabio Fognini		QF
W  98	  Davide Sanguinetti 	QF
RG 95	  Renzo Furlan	     	QF
AO 91	  Cristiano Caratti  	QF
RG 80	  Corrado Barazzutti 	QF
W  79     Adriano Panatta	QF
RG 78	  Corrado Barazzutti	SF
UO 77	  Corrado Barazzutti	SF
RG 77	  Adriano Panatta	QF
RG 76	  Adriano Panatta	W
RG 75	  Adriano Panatta	SF
RG 73	  Paolo Bertolucci	QF
RG 73	  Adriano Panatta	SF
RG 72	  Adriano Panatta	QF

Despite the fact that male Italian players seem strongest on the dirt, since 1978 no one reached the semifinal of a Grand Slam. Even Fabio Fognini’s quarterfinal appearance at Roland Garros 2011 was the first in 13 years. Marco Cecchinato is one win away of being the first Italian Grand Slam finalist since 1976.

Marco Cecchinato was not seeded. If we look at Grand Slam semifinals comprised of unseeded players an interesting pattern appears.

Tourney Player  	    	Reached
RG 18	Marco Cecchinato  	SF
AO 18	Hyeon Chung		SF
AO 18	Kyle Edmund		SF
W  08	Rainer Schuettler	SF
W  08	Marat Safin		SF
RG 08	Gael Monfils		SF
AO 08	Jo Wilfried Tsonga	F
UO 06	Mikhail Youzhny		SF
W  06	Jonas Bjorkman		SF
AO 06	Marcos Baghdatis	F
UO 05	Robby Ginepri		SF
RG 05	Mariano Puerta		F
W  04	Mario Ancic		SF
RG 04	Gaston Gaudio		W
AO 04	Marat Safin		F
W  03	Mark Philippoussis	F
RG 03	Martin Verkerk		F
AO 03	Wayne Ferreira		SF
W  01	Goran Ivanisevic	W
UO 00	Todd Martin		SF
W  00	Vladimir Voltchkov	SF
RG 00	Franco Squillari	SF

Since 2008 this is only the third time that an unseeded player reached the semifinal. All three occurrences happended this year. It appears that we can again get used to see new faces deep into the second week of a Grand Slam tournament.

Finally, let’s take a look at Grand Slam semifinals between players using a one-handed backhand. The decreasing popularity of the one-hander has already been discussed here and with this in mind it seems even more unique that Dominic Thiem–the player who Marco Cecchinato will face tomorrow in the semifinal–inititally played a two-hander, but then changed to a one-hander.

Tourney Player 1	    	Player 2
RG 18	Marco Cecchinato  	Dominic Thiem
AO 17	Roger Federer		Stanislas Wawrinka
UO 15	Roger Federer		Stanislas Wawrinka
W  09	Roger Federer		Tommy Haas
W  07	Roger Federer		Richard Gasquet
AO 07	Fernando Gonzalez	Tommy Haas
UO 04	Roger Federer		Tim Henman
UO 02	Pete Sampras		Sjeng Schalken
RG 02	Albert Costa		Alex Corretja
W  99	Pete Sampras		Tim Henman
UO 98	Patrick Rafter		Pete Sampras
W  98	Pete Sampras		Tim Henman

If we ignore Roger Federer and Stanislas Wawrinka, two players who brought the one-handed backhand back into discussion, the last Grand Slam semifinal between two one-handers was played between Fernando Gonzalez and Tommy Haas at the Australian Open 2007. Before that, Pete Sampras was involved in four of six such encounters. Without Roger and Pete the world of one-handed Grand Slam semifinals would look really thin.

Whatever the result of the semifinal between Marco Cecchinato and Dominic Thiem will be, we know already that Marco achieved what only few players have done before him, especially in recent years. Whether he will be able to repeat this feat at Wimbledon, where he will be seeded despite having never won a match on a grass court, is arguable. Still, placing a bet on his own first round loss probably won’t be a good idea–at the very least, a lot more fans will be watching his opening match than ever before.

* A previous version of this article wrongly stated that the Wimbledon 2001 championship run by Goran Ivanisevic is more similar to Marco Cecchinato’s run. However, in 2001 Ivanisevic had already achieved his career high ranking, which is not the case for Cecchinato. Thanks for @rtwkr at Twitter for pointing this out.

—

Peter Wetz is a computer scientist interested in racket sports and data analytics based in Vienna, Austria.

Big Four Losing Streaks

Italian translation at settesei.it

This is a guest post by Peter Wetz.

Novak Djokovic’s loss against Benoit Paire in his first match at this year’s Miami Masters caused a lot of head scratching. Not only did Benoit equalize his head to head against Novak–next to Hyeon Chung he is now the only active player with a balanced record against Novak; four active players hold positive records–but this was also the Serbian’s third consecutive loss.

Novak immediately made some changes, announcing the end of his partnership with his coach Andre Agassi and part-time coach Radek Stepanek after having worked with them just a few months.

A losing streak of this length by such a dominant player must be rare, and it prompted me to look for similar instances among the big four. The following table shows all three (or more) match losing streaks of the big four after they cracked the top ten in reverse chronological order. The last column shows the Elo-based probability (Prob) of having such a streak. This is simply the product of the probabilities of losing the matches that made up the streak.

Player    Start	        End	Length	Prob
Djokovic  2018-01-15	-*	3	0.002%  (0.027%**)
Murray	  2011-01-17	03-23	4	0.02%
Murray	  2010-03-11	04-11	3	0.63%
Nadal	  2009-11-08	11-22	4	1.89%
Djokovic  2007-10-15	11-12	5	0.07%
Federer	  2002-07-08	08-19	4	0.66%

* Streak still active

** Probability when adjusting Elo ratings due to absence from the tour

The table shows that since August 2002 Roger Federer never lost more than two matches in a row. Even his four match losing streak is the second most likely due to the strong competition he had to face. In November 2009 Rafael Nadal lost four matches in a row, but with a probability far higher than the other streaks. The reason is that three of the four matches occurred at the World Tour Finals, increasing the likelihood of a loss.

A number that stands out is the probability of Novak’s current streak: 0.002%. However, this number is based on traditional Elo ratings which do not take into account player absence, for instance, due to injury. Before this season Novak took a six month break suffering from a shoulder injury.

As has already been discussed, there are ways to adjust Elo ratings for players coming back on the tour. In the case of Maria Sharapova, who stayed absent for 15 months, a 200 point drop in her first five matches after the break was more in line with her level of play than simply assuming that she remained as competitive as before. For this analysis I used a drop of 150 rating points for Novak, which results in a more realistic streak probability of  0.027%, still the second lowest in the list.

This brings us to Andy Murray‘s losing streak of 2011, which most of us probably have already forgotten. After losing the Australian Open final to Novak, Andy lost against Marcos Baghdatis (#20) in Rotterdam, Donald Young (#143) in Indian Wells, and Alex Bogomolov (#118) in Miami. This looks very similar to Novak’s current situation, but Murray bounced back to achieve a 50-9 record for the remainder of the season. It remains to be seen whether Djokovic can do the same.

—

Peter Wetz is a computer scientist interested in racket sports and data analytics based in Vienna, Austria.

ATP Streaks of 2017

Italian translation at settesei.it

This is a guest post by Peter Wetz.

With the recent update of Jeff’s ATP and WTA GitHub repositories, we can take a look at notable streaks that happened in 2017. In this post I show matches won/lost and tiebreaks won/lost streaks of the 2017 ATP tour.

Let’s start with matches won:

Name               Start   End     Length
Rafael Nadal       04-17   05-15   17
Rafael Nadal       08-28   10-09   16
Roger Federer      06-19   08-07   16
Roger Federer      10-09   11-13   13
Roger Federer      03-06   03-20   12
Alexander Zverev   07-31   08-07   10
Rafael Nadal       05-29   07-03   10
Stan Wawrinka      05-22   05-29   10
Grigor Dimitrov    01-02   01-16   10

We see that, as far as streaks are concerned, the 2017 season was dominated by Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. Rafa’s streak of 17 wins, which was halted by Dominic Thiem in the Rome quarterfinal, is the only streak containing three back-to-back tournament wins. Besides Roger and Rafa, only Alexander Zverev won two tournaments back-to-back.

When we talk about the less glamorous category of losing streaks, two names immediately should pop into our minds: Vincent Spadea and Donald Young. The former holds the record of 21 consecutive matches lost* on ATP level, and the latter holds one of the longer losing streaks (17 matches lost in a row) in recent years.

During the 2017 ATP season no player came close to any of these marks, but still there were a few moments where players seemed to have forgotten how to win a match. The following list shows all players with 8 or more consecutive matches lost.

Name                  Start   End     Length
Pablo Cuevas          05-29   10-23   10
Maximilian Marterer   02-06   08-28   10
Paolo Lorenzi         08-28   10-30    8 
Malek Jaziri          03-20   07-03    8 
Daniil Medvedev       07-31   10-09    8 
Stefanos Tsitsipas    02-13   10-02    8

Regarding Maximilian Marterer‘s streak of 10 matches lost, we have to mention that he played a good season at the Challenger level. In between his losses at the ATP level there were deep runs at various Challenger tournaments. Still, it must be frustrating to lose your first round main draw match every time after having successfully gone through qualies. This fact accounts for 7 of his 10 losses at ATP main draws (the other 3 coming from entries as a wild card). Pablo Cuevas, the other player having lost 10 matches in a row last season, on the other hand, achieved a real losing streak with no Challenger level wins hidden among them.

Winning tiebreaks has been discussed on this blog a lot. One of the conclusions was that in the past three players–Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and John Isner–consistently outperform their tiebreak expectations. The list of consecutive tiebreaks won in 2017 supports this statement as can be seen in the following table.

Name           Start   End     Length
John Isner     05-15   05-29   11   
Roger Federer  06-19   08-07   8 
Roger Federer  03-06   03-20   8 
(Many tied)                    7

John Isner’s streak went over the course of 8 matches including 2 matches he lost, whereas Roger won all the matches in which he won the tiebreaks contributing to his streaks.

The list of consecutive tiebreaks lost looks as follows.

Name            Start   End     Length
Lucas Pouille   07-03   10-09   12 
Florian Mayer   01-02   07-03   11
Dusan Lajovic   03-06   07-24   8

Lucas Pouille holds the crown for most tiebreaks lost in a row in 2017. In fact he got really close to Robin Haase‘s infamous run of 13 tiebreaks lost.

Finally, I want to present an odd 2017 achievement by Nick Kyrgios: He is the only player ever to lose three matches in a row by retirement.

Date   Tourney   Matchup                           Result
07-31  W'ington  Nick Kyrgios vs Tennys Sandgren   3-6 0-3 RET
07-03  Wimby     Nick Kyrgios vs Pierre H Herbert  3-6 4-6 RET
06-19  London    Nick Kyrgios vs Donald Young      6-7(3) 0-0 RET

The list of 2018 streaks is shaping up nicely already: Doubles partners Oliver Marach and Mate Pavic opened their season with 17 straight wins, including three titles, finally ending with a loss in the Rotterdam final to Pierre-Hugues Herbert and Nicolas Mahut. Marach can even claim an 18-match streak, since he won a Davis Cup match for Austria last month while pairing with Philipp Oswald. Doubles data is tougher to come by, but it’s safe to say that the season-opening run for Marach/Pavic will have a prominent place in any summaries of this year’s ATP streaks.

 

* The list excludes one loss of Vincent Spadea at the 1999 World Team Cup in Düsseldorf, where he lost to Rainer Schüttler 5-7, 6-3, 1-6.

—

Peter Wetz is a computer scientist interested in racket sports and data analytics based in Vienna, Austria.

Overperforming in Davis Cup

This is a guest post by Peter Wetz.

With the help of weighted surface specific Elo ratings we have a powerful new tool to measure player performance. The traditional conclusion of the tennis season, the Davis Cup final, provides us with an opportunity once again to examine which players thrive when competing for their nation and which players seem to suffer from the pressure. While we are at it, I don’t like the sound of the word offseason. After all, there are still ITF tournaments, not to mention the Australian Open Asia-Pacific Wildcard Play-offs.

As already hinted, Elo ratings have proven to represent a better picture of player quality than traditional ATP rankings. Hence, comparing expected wins based on Elo with actual wins provides us with a clearer picture of who outperforms expectations and who does not.

In this evaluation, I consider completed World Group and Group 1 Davis Cup live rubbers played since 1980. The data set contains around 5000 matches through this year’s World Group Quarterfinals, and I’ve limited my focus to players having played 15 or more matches.

Let’s first take a glance at the obvious stat, win-loss percentage. The following table shows the top ten win-loss records of all players under consideration. (The Active column denotes if the player is still an active player).

Name	        W	L	Perc	Active
Rafael Nadal	20	1	95%	1
Boris Becker	31	2	94%	0
Andy Murray	25	3	90%	1
Balazs Taroczy	23	3	89%	0
David Ferrer	20	3	87%	1
Andre Agassi	23	4	85%	0
Roger Federer	40	7	85%	1
Novak Djokovic	27	5	84%	1
Guillermo Vilas	16	3	84%	0
Andrei Medvedev	16	3	84%	0

As one would expect, the big four and other all time greats are included. However, this obviously does not tell the whole story. Rafael Nadal is expected to win most of the time and that is what he does. For such a player, it is hard to outperform expectations.

If we compute how much a player outperforms his expectations, we get a clearer picture, given we want to know who does especially well in Davis Cup. Expected wins are calculated based on a half-and-half mix of surface specific Elo and overall Elo as this, in general, provides close to the best results, as pointed out in a previous article.

The tables below show the top and bottom five among all (first table) and active (second table) players in terms of over and underperforming expected wins. It shows actual wins (W), expected wins (eW), the percentage of over or underperformance (+/-), and if a player is still active.

Name	         W	eW	+/-	active
Francisco Maciel 11	6	72%	0
Slobodan Zi'vic  20	11	72%	0
Vasek Pospisil	 9	5	71%	1
Adrian Ungur	 6	3	56%	1
Mahesh Bhupathi	 5	3	55%	0
...
Wally Masur	 7	10     -31%	0
Sebastien Lareau 7	10     -31%	0
James Blake	 7	10     -36%	0
Nicolas Kiefer	 6	10     -40%	0
Aqeel Khan	 2	4      -57%	0

Name	        W	eW	+/-	Active
Vasek Pospisil	9	5	71%	1
Adrian Ungur	6	3	56%	1
Andrey Golubev	13	8	46%	1
Di Wu	        14	9	45%	1
Steve Darcis	15	11	35%	1
...
Florian Mayer	7	8      -14%	1
Gilles Muller	9	10     -15%	1
Alejandro Falla	8	9      -17%	1
John Isner	9	11     -19%	1
Jurgen Melzer	20	25     -22%	1

The tables seem to overlap with some conventional wisdom floating through the tennis sphere. Namely, that Steve Darcis, despite his recent losses at the Davis Cup final, plays above expectations. Also, Jurgen Melzer is known for regularly disappointing Austrian Davis Cup fans. (In his defense, he created several moments of joy, too).

If we were to pick a Davis Cup hero for the active and inactive group of players, Slobodan Zivojinovic and Andrey Golubev seem to be good choices. Golubev has a record of 13-6 (68%) and outperforms expected wins by 46%. He provides a good combination of consistently beating players he should beat and scoring more than his share of exceptional upsets (Wawrinka 2014, Goffin 2014, Melzer 2013 and Berdych 2011).

Zivojinovic provides a similar pattern with a record of 20-8 (71%), 72% better than expected. He tallied six wins out of ten matches in which Elo assigned him a win probability of less than 25%. Further, he only lost one match in when his pre-match odds of winning were greater than 35%.

This post provides insight into how Elo ratings help in quantifying a player’s performance. We identified players who have (not) shown great improvement on what the algorithm expected based on results from the regular tour. For future research it would be interesting to delve into Davis Cup doubles heroes: Where there are no dead rubbers, stakes are always high.

—

Peter Wetz is a computer scientist interested in racket sports and data analytics based in Vienna, Austria.