Italian tennis hardly needs any more prospects, but Luciano Darderi has announced himself as yet another young player to watch. The Argentinian-born right-hander turns 22 today, three days after securing his debut ATP title. He came through qualifying in Cordoba, and in just his third appearance in a tour-level main draw, knocked out the 2nd, 4th, and 7th seeds en route to the championship.
Darderi is a supercharged clay courter, comfortable on dirt yet possessing a serve and forehand that will play on faster surfaces. He cracked 25 aces in the Cordoba main draw, plus another 11 in qualifying. On Sunday, fellow qualifier Facundo Bagnis got barely half of Darderi’s first serves back in play. Against Sebastian Baez in the semi-finals, the Italian ended 22 points with a forehand winner or forced error and, as we will see, held his own from the baseline against one of the game’s most stubborn defenders.
Though the magnitude of Darderi’s breakthrough came out of nowhere, he has been inching toward a double-digit ranking for some time. He reached 13 Challenger quarter-finals last year, advancing to three finals and collecting a pair of titles. He finished the year ranked 128th and gained 60 places with the victory in Cordoba, ensuring he’ll have plenty more chances to prove his mettle on tour.
He hasn’t hesitated to take advantage, dropping just three games in beating Mariano Navone in Buenos Aires yesterday. The victory extended the Italian’s winning streak to eight and shows just how fast he is developing, having lost to Navone in a bruising Challenger final just a few months ago.
It won’t always be so smooth for Darderi: The hard-court skew of the top level of the circuit may not prove hospitable to a youngster who has played 84% of his career matches on clay. Even with the right weapons in hand, it will take some time to become more than just a dark horse on the Golden Swing. But that’s all in the future: Darderi’s 22nd birthday is an ideal opportunity to dig into the upsets that lifted him from Challenger warrior to the top 100.
Bullying the little guy
The defining win of the Italian’s week in Cordoba was the semi-final. Baez struggled at the end of 2023, but he is always a tough out on clay, especially coming off a third-set-tiebreak victory in Davis Cup. At just five-feet, seven-inches tall, the Argentinian relies on speed and defense, neutralizing the weapons of larger men. It doesn’t always work–his serve puts him at an immediate disadvantage, and he can become overly aggressive and error-prone to compensate–but he doesn’t give much away.
Despite his size, Baez doesn’t mind going toe-to-toe with an opponent’s best shot. In 19 clay-court matches tracked by the Match Charting Project since the beginning of 2022, Baez’s opponents have hit forehands–excluding service returns–as 61% of their baseline shots, compared to a tour-wide clay-court average of 55%. Thomaz Bellucci found the forehand 72% of the time against the Argentinian; Tallon Griekspoor clocked in at 71%.
Both lost. No matter what the shot, if you find yourself in a rally with Baez, your odds aren’t good. When you hit a forehand after the service return, your chances of winning the point are 45%; with a backhand, your chances are 44%. (Tour averages on clay are 53% and 47%, respectively.) Some individual cases are downright comical. In the 2022 Bastad quarter-finals, Dominic Thiem won just 27% of points when he hit a forehand. When the two men met again in the Kitzbuhel final last year, Thiem relied a bit more on his backhand. Alas, he won only 14% of points when he hit one of those.
Darderi ran around a few backhands to find his bigger weapon, but he generally refused to take the bait. He waited for his spots to attack one of the toughest men on tour to be patient against. This table details the results he got from his forehands and backhands in the semi-final:
FH/GS FH W% FH Wnr% FH UFE%
Darderi vs Baez 55.4% 50.6% 12.2% 8.5%
Average vs Baez 60.6% 45.2% 10.4% 12.0%
BH/GS BH W% BH Wnr% BH UFE%
Darderi vs Baez 44.6% 48.5% 6.1% 6.8%
Average vs Baez 39.4% 43.8% 6.3% 10.3%
The Italian hit fewer forehands than the usual Baez opponent, and it won him more points, in part thanks to hitting winners at a higher rate and coughing up fewer unforced errors. His backhand numbers were favorable as well, perhaps in part because he set up for backhands in places where other opponents would go for an inside-out forehand. He was particularly stingy with free points on that wing.
Despite possessing the bigger gun, Darderi let his opponent make the mistakes. Baez obliged, piling up 32 unforced errors, including an uncharacteristic 11% of his backhands. Winning percentages of 50.6% and 48.5% hardly make for good headlines, but coupled with a big serve, they are enough to beat Baez. Few players on tour have been able to manage the same.
Tailored attack
The classic clay-court baseline weapon is the inside-out forehand, a salvo that might not end the point, but will pull the opponent out of position and leave the court open for a finishing blow. Darderi can win matches with that shot, as he did in the final against Bagnis. His left-handed opponent kept sending balls to his backhand corner, and the Italian ran around a lot of them. More than half of Darderi’s forehands in the final were inside-out, and he won the point 78% of the time he hit one. The match wasn’t close.
As we’ve seen, though, manufacturing forehands against Baez is a trap. The Argentinian can blunt the angle and absorb the pace, and meanwhile, his opponent is out of position. When Thiem had his terrible day in Bastad, he hit 62 inside-out forehands, only 16 of them in points that he won. (He typically wins more than half, as does the tour as a whole.) Whether by preparation or intuition, Darderi took those chances much less often, and far less frequently than he would against Bagnis. Just one in six of his forehands were of the inside-out variety, and he won just shy of half those points.
Instead, with Baez accustomed to playing defense on the backhand side, Darderi attacked to the forehand. While he didn’t go crosscourt particularly often, he hit hard when he did. 22% of his crosscourt forehands ended the point in his favor with a winner or forced error. That shot can be a slightly favorable play against Baez–opponents win 47% of those points, compared to 45% for forehands overall–but only Nicolas Jarry has cleaned up against Baez in this category the way that Darderi did. It’s way too early to draw any conclusions about how the Italian’s game will fare on tour, but when you share the top of a forehand leaderboard with Jarry, you’re doing something right.
A big serve and a forehand isn’t enough: Nearly everybody has those, even if Darderi’s forehand has a bit of extra mojo. Upsetting the forehand-neutralizing Baez, especially in between victories against less complicated opponents, is a sign that the Italian has resources between his ears as well. Every week, it seems, Italian tennis looks a little bit better.
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Felix Auger-Aliassime in 2023. Credit: aarublevnews
There may not be a more beautiful serve in tennis. When Felix Auger-Aliassime is hitting his targets, returners don’t have a chance. Auger-Aliassime has been particularly deadly on indoor hard courts, winning four such championships in 2022, then defending his Basel title last October.
Before returning to the winner’s circle at the Swiss Indoors, the Canadian’s 2023 season was one to forget. He struggled with a knee injury that knocked him out of Lyon and most of the grass-court season, where he would otherwise have figured to thrive. Between Miami–where he last reached his career-best ATP ranking of 6th–and Tokyo, he won just two matches in a dozen starts. We can’t hold much of that against him; when it wasn’t the injury, it was the recovery or the rust.
But he hasn’t played like a top-tenner in 2024, either. He lost to Daniel Altmaier to open his campaign, got dragged into a five-hour slog by Dominic Thiem in Melbourne, and then fell yesterday in Marseille to Zhang Zhizhen. The Chinese man, who lost to 1,107th-ranked Sebastian Dominko in Davis Cup last weekend, isn’t the sort of player who should threaten the likes of Auger-Aliassime, especially on an indoor hard court. Marseille has a reputation as a relatively slow surface for an indoor event, but according to my numbers, it played almost exactly as fast as Basel did last year.
With such a serve, the rest of Felix’s game should fall into place. But it hasn’t, and even the Canadian’s service games can get messy. Zhang broke him three times in ten tries yesterday, and he came close to a fourth. Last week in Montpellier, Auger-Aliassime saved just one of six break points before squeaking past Arthur Cazaux. Apart from an occasional glut of double faults, the serve itself rarely fails him. He reliably sends in aces on at least one of ten service points. Nearly one-third of his serves don’t come back. So what’s the problem?
The Canadian charge
There’s a certain style of play that has become recognizably Canadian, by some combination of the influence of Milos Raonic and the natural development of players who grow up practicing indoors. While Auger-Aliassime, Denis Shapovalov, and Leylah Fernandez–like Raonic before them–rarely serve-and-volley, they often venture far inside the baseline after serving. The move puts them in excellent position to swat away weak replies, at the cost of getting exposed by a deep return.
(The move also calls to mind Evonne Goolagong, perhaps the most casual serve-and-volleyer in the game’s history. Martina Navratilova said of her, “She didn’t serve-and-volley; she would sort of saunter-and-volley.”)
If Felix’s aggressive court position pays off, it should show up in his second shot stats. This may sound familiar, because I talked about the same thing in my piece about Sebastian Korda earlier this week. Though Korda’s serve isn’t quite the weapon that Auger-Aliassime’s is, the two men are similar in that their overall results don’t seem to reflect the strength of their opening deliveries. Korda, for all of his power, hits a second-shot (plus-one) winner or forced error 17% of the time that a return comes back, almost exactly in line with tour average.
Auger-Aliassime is similarly punchless. I ran the numbers again, this time back to 2019 instead of 2020, to capture most of the Canadian’s career. The plus-one winner rates are a bit different, but not enough to alter the story. I’ve also included more players for comparison:
Player Plus-one winner%
Milos Raonic 24.4%
Denis Shapovalov 21.5%
Matteo Berrettini 19.5%
Carlos Alcaraz 19.1%
Holger Rune 18.6%
Lorenzo Sonego 18.4%
Stefanos Tsitsipas 18.2%
Felix Auger-Aliassime 17.6%
Sebastian Korda 17.3%
-- Average -- 17.2%
Jannik Sinner 16.8%
Daniil Medvedev 16.3%
Given the potency of his serve and the positioning risks he takes, Auger-Aliassime finds himself in the wrong section of this list. He’s not as one-dimensional as Raonic, and he’s less explosive (and erratic) than Shapovalov, but couldn’t he play more like Berrettini? You might argue that Felix’s ground game is better than the Italian’s, and he can thrive without forcing the issue so quickly. That may be true–I believe the Canadian and his team think this way–but the numbers don’t bear it out.
Over their careers, Auger-Aliassime and Berrettini have hit unreturned serves at exactly the same rate. Yet the Italian wins two percentage points more often on his second shot. The overall picture is even more dramatic: Berrettini’s career tour-level rates of 69% serve points won and 88% service games held are each better than Felix has posted in any single season. Berrettini’s forehand is better, sure, but I can’t believe that accounts for the entire difference. The Canadian’s wait-and-see approach too often turns into a ten stroke rally that ends in favor of the other guy.
The Achilles heel
I promised you a weak spot of mythological proportions, and you’re going to get it.
The story of yesterday’s loss to Zhang was captured, oddly enough, in one of the service games that Felix won. At 1-3 in the second set, he raced to 30-love with two points straight from the textbook: big serve to the backhand, shallow reply, swat away a winner. He scored another classic plus-one at 30-15.
The two points he lost, though, show what happens when someone reads the serve, or when he misses the first serve and doesn’t do much with the second. At both 30-0 and 40-15, Zhang took advantage of a second serve to put the return at Felix’s feet. The first time, the Canadian could only keep the ball in play, and he lost a six-stroke rally. Two points later, Auger-Aliassime unforced-errored the backhand plus-one. He secured the hold with a better second serve at 40-30, but he isn’t always so lucky.
When returns land in the service box, Felix’s results are strong, even if he isn’t as aggressive as Berrettini or his fellow Canadians. Here are several stats profiling what happens to those weak replies: plus-one winner rates (P1 W%), plus-one error rates (P1 UFE%), and overall point winning percentage:
Player P1 W% P1 UFE% Pt W%
Milos Raonic 43% 12% 64%
Denis Shapovalov 36% 16% 60%
Matteo Berrettini 34% 14% 60%
Holger Rune 32% 13% 61%
Carlos Alcaraz 32% 12% 66%
Felix Auger-Aliassime 31% 13% 62%
Sebastian Korda 31% 14% 61%
Daniil Medvedev 30% 9% 63%
Stefanos Tsitsipas 29% 11% 62%
Lorenzo Sonego 29% 13% 57%
-- Average -- 28% 12% 60%
Jannik Sinner 28% 11% 63%
These numbers are from 2019 to present, so Raonic’s stats are probably a caricature of the tactics he used at his peak. Still, it seems like Auger-Aliassime ought to be ending a few more of these points immediately. Either way, there’s no reason to complain about his ultimate outcomes–he wins more of these points than Berrettini does, and almost as many as Daniil Medvedev or Jannik Sinner. (Side note: Holy Alcaraz!)
Here is the same set of stats for returns that are not so shallow, but are still closer to the service line than the baseline. (The Match Charting Project calls these “deep”–as opposed to “very deep” returns.)
Player P1 W% P1 UFE% Pt W%
Milos Raonic 31% 12% 56%
Denis Shapovalov 24% 16% 54%
Holger Rune 23% 13% 60%
Matteo Berrettini 20% 14% 54%
Lorenzo Sonego 20% 14% 54%
Stefanos Tsitsipas 20% 11% 58%
Carlos Alcaraz 18% 13% 57%
Sebastian Korda 17% 16% 55%
Felix Auger-Aliassime 17% 13% 53%
-- Average -- 16% 12% 55%
Daniil Medvedev 15% 9% 56%
Jannik Sinner 14% 10% 56%
Take away a couple of feet of court position, and Auger-Aliassime’s results look awfully pedestrian. He still hits more plus-one winners than average, but barely, and at the cost of more errors. He wins fewer of these points than average, and fewer than anyone in this selected group of players. If we make the reasonable assumption that the returns coming back from Felix’s serves are weaker than average–even if they land in the same sector of the court–those middle-of-the-pack numbers look even worse.
I hope you’ve stuck with me, because you’re about to find out how to beat Felix. It’s not easy, but it worked for Zhang. Here’s how players manage against very deep returns–the ones that land closer to the baseline than the service line:
Player P1 W% P1 UFE% Pt W%
Milos Raonic 15% 14% 47%
Denis Shapovalov 12% 14% 50%
Matteo Berrettini 12% 11% 52%
Stefanos Tsitsipas 11% 10% 52%
Holger Rune 11% 11% 51%
Sebastian Korda 10% 10% 50%
Lorenzo Sonego 9% 14% 53%
-- Average -- 8% 8% 51%
Carlos Alcaraz 8% 7% 54%
Felix Auger-Aliassime 7% 9% 47%
Daniil Medvedev 6% 6% 54%
Jannik Sinner 6% 7% 52%
Auger-Aliassime plays these points like he’s Medvedev, but his baseline game can’t support those tactics. He wins these points at the same rate as late-career, physically compromised Raonic.
This is, in large part, the cost of that aggressive court position. Some players, like Alcaraz, can get away with it. Raonic couldn’t, but he put away so many cheap points that he could live with the drawbacks. It’s exaggerating only a bit to say that Auger-Aliassime gets the worst of both worlds: He doesn’t pick up an unusually high number of freebies, but then he finds himself on the back foot whenever someone manages to land a deep return.
That was the story of Zhang’s upset win yesterday. When the Chinese player hit a shallow reply, Felix won 11 of 15. When the return landed behind the service line, the success rate fell to just 8 of 25. It isn’t always that bad, and even when it is, a uptick in unreturned serves (or a strong return performance) can salvage the day. But opponents will only get better at reading the Canadian’s serve, and perhaps they will recognize that they needn’t attempt any heroics as long as they place the return deep in the court.
Auger-Aliassime isn’t going to wake up one day able to play like Medvedev, however much he might like to. He can, however, choose to play more like Raonic or Berrettini. His current approach is probably good enough for a long stay in the top 20: Elo ranks him 17th, at least until it updates with yesterday’s loss. But if he hopes to crack the top five, he’ll need to do more with the profits from that gorgeous serve.
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February 8-10, 1974: Sideshows take center stage
For a week in February 1974, the women’s tennis circuit had to make do without Billie Jean King. Fortunately, George Liddy was ready to pick up the promotional slack, and then some.
The Slims tour headed to Fort Lauderdale for an event on Chris Evert’s home turf–or, more accurately, her home Har-Tru. Billie Jean didn’t like her odds on clay in enemy territory, so it was a good time for a week off. In her absence, Evert provided the drubbings, Rosie Casals delivered the controversy, and–fulfilling what one newspaperman called Liddy’s “kinky dreams”–none other than Bobby Riggs showed up to sell more tickets.
The biggest story of the week took place off the court. Liddy was promoting more than just the S&H Green Stamps Tennis Classic; he also organized a track exhibition for the Friday night of the tournament. The big attraction was Riggs, who came to town for a much-ballyhooed race against famous miler Jim Ryun. (Earning a living as a professional track star could be complicated: Ryun had taken part in a tennis exhibition the previous June.) Ryun was a world-record holder and Olympic silver medalist, so in true Riggs fashion, some handicapping was in order. The 55-year-old hustler would get a half-mile head start.
Bobby was old, but he wasn’t that old. On February 8th, after a track clinic, a marching band, a pole-vault exhibition, and a 100-meter dash featuring some football players, the real business of the evening got underway. Riggs emerged, accompanied by a phalanx of young women and sporting a portable microphone to spice up the eventual television broadcast. He made a side bet with Rosie Casals and jokingly pleaded with organizers for an even bigger head start.
Ryun ran a respectable 4:03, but he never caught up with America’s most famous male chauvinist. Riggs ran his 890 yards in 3:22 for an easy victory.
“I’d say he needed another 200 yards,” Ryun said.
As for Riggs, he hadn’t been working out much since the Battle of the Sexes the previous September. His assessment: “I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired.”
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Casals was tired, too. She had spent most of the week griping: The tour came back to Florida too often, she didn’t like to play on clay, it was cold and windy, and the crowd was partisan to the point of rudeness when she faced Jeanne Evert in the second round. Another of her complaints–about thoughtless scheduling–had merit. After a late-night doubles match on Thursday, she was first up on Friday’s order of play.
As if that weren’t enough, her routine defeat of Francoise Durr earned her a place in the semi-finals against Chrissie herself. “Nobody’s unbeatable,” Rosie said. But on Saturday, she salvaged just one game. Casals had to settle for a lesser prize–a local columnist declared her the champion of the press room.
The final had unexpected potential. Evert had been expected to run away with the title, and she hadn’t done anything to call that forecast into question. But second-seeded Kerry Melville looked like she might just make it close, allowing just two games to Nancy Gunter in her semi-final. Melville herself had said that the chance of anyone beating the home favorite in Fort Lauderdale were “very, very slim.” But after a near-flawless match, she felt differently: “If I play like I played today, I think I have a good chance of beating Chris.”
Alas, it wasn’t to be. At the hotel on Saturday night, Melville walked to the bathroom in the dark and fractured her toe. She withdrew, and the title went to Evert.
Liddy, though, had another ace up his sleeve. Riggs was already scheduled to play an exhibition match on finals day, against Miami Dolphins quarterback Bob Griese and wide receiver Ron Sellers. Bobby would play one-on-two, and the crowd would get the full raincoat-and-umbrella handicapping show. Everyone would go home with a smile on their face.
The biggest draw of the day, though, was Liddy’s last-minute replacement. Refunds were available, but only two ticketholders asked for their money back.
To play Evert, the promoter brought in none other than Althea Gibson, the two-time Wimbledon champion who had been the world’s best player in the late 1950s. Gibson had since earned her living as a golfer and made occasional attempts at a tennis comeback now that the sport had gone pro. At age 46, no one expected her to upset Chrissie, and she didn’t, winning just three games. But she impressed nonetheless.
“I don’t think there is anyone in women’s tennis today that serves it with that much pure power,” Evert said. “I was really surprised.” Althea wanted a rematch. After all, as one fan shouted during play, Gibson won more games off of Chris than Casals did.
Rosie, though, could take one consolation from the finals-day slate. The crowd immediately took to Althea, the obvious underdog and a legend to boot. Finally, a stadium full of Florida tennis fans was cheering against an Evert.
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Also today: Bublik’s quartet of comebacks; top seed upset trivia
Diana Shnaider at the 2023 US Open. Credit: Hameltion
Diana Shnaider lost her place in the WTA top 100 after her first-round exit at the Australian Open. But before we had time to reevaluate her place on the prospect list, she hurled her momentum back in the other direction, going through the top three seeds in Hua Hin, Thailand, to win her first career tour-level title. (More later on the trivia aspect.)
The Russian left-hander is only 19 years old, and her new ranking of #73 places her fourth among all women under 21. (She’s also up to 76th on the Elo list, ranked among the top 70 on hard courts.) The only younger players ahead of her are Coco Gauff, Linda Noskova, and Mirra Andreeva. Gauff is already a major winner, and Andreeva is three years younger, the impossibly young sensation of the moment. Noskova, though, is just seven months younger; coming off a quarter-final showing in Australia, she has already cracked the top 30. Shnaider trails the Czech by some distance on the points table, but she is every bit as promising of a prospect.
Zhu Lin, the Chinese veteran seeded third in Hua Hin, was no match for Shnaider yesterday. A second-set tactical shift–and a delayed response from the Russian–sent the match to a decider, but when Shnaider adjusted and Zhu failed to offer any new problems, it became a race to the finish. The 19-year-old completed her sixth top-50 victory, collecting the trophy by the score of 6-3, 2-6, 6-1.
Shnaider’s response to the final-round challenge was a fitting end to the week. Her three seeded victims–Zhu, Magda Linette, and Wang Xinyu–play different styles of tennis. Each one, at times, threatened to derail the Russian’s own game. She doesn’t yet have the weapons to impose herself on a top-tier opponent; her game may never be quite big enough for that. But her ability to handle the variety on offer in Hua Hin is an encouraging sign that she is maturing as a player. It could be a very long time before she gives up her place in the top 100.
Pushing around
The Russian has described herself an aggressive player. “I never wanted to be a pusher,” she told Christopher Clarey. “I was always like: ‘OK, here’s the shot. I’m killing it.'”
She isn’t a pusher, but by the standards of modern-day women’s tennis, she isn’t particularly aggressive, either. Her serve isn’t big enough to dictate play: 80% of them come back, setting her equal to Elina Svitolina or Emma Navarro. She uses her groundstrokes as weapons in every direction, but she plays within herself and leaves winners on the table. She ends points a bit more often than the typical WTAer from the baseline in exchange for a tour-average rate of unforced errors. Her Rally Aggression Score, across six charted matches from the last year, is +13, slightly above the norm and similar to that of Maria Sakkari.
It’s tempting to label her a counterpuncher, especially after watching a highlight reel or two. The broadcast commentator for her first-round victory over Linette was reduced to sputtering “No way!” after one unlikely recovery; my own reaction was less printable. She’s extremely fast, deceptively so. Woe betide the opponent who approaches the net. A singles court is 27 feet wide, and Shnaider needs only a few inches.
But “counterpuncher” isn’t right either. She’s not a pusher, she’s a pusher-around. Her relatively flat crosscourt groundstrokes off both wings are daunting, especially the left-handed forehand. The Russian rarely squanders an opportunity to do something with a groundstroke, whether that means widening the court or dislodging her opponent from the baseline. She doesn’t go for broke, but there’s not much passivity in her approach.
Shnaider’s brand of pushing-around works best against an opponent with an exploitable backhand. Linette’s backhand was too steady, which is what made the first rounder the Russian’s closest contest of the week. (Each woman won 75 of the first 150 points before the knot was finally untied.) Against Wang Xinyu and Zhu Lin, the crosscourt forehand consistently took control of points:
MATCH W/FE% PointsWon%
SF vs Wang 27% 76%
FI vs Zhu 30% 66%
-- DS Avg 20% 59%
-- Tour Avg 14% 53%
R1 vs Linette 22% 47%
These numbers are for crosscourt forehands only. When she hits them, Shnaider ends points in her favor one-fifth of the time, and she came close to one in three yesterday against Zhu. More commonly, the pressure created by that stroke–not the individual shot itself–is what wins the point. The average WTA player picks up barely half of points in which they hit a crosscourt forehand. It’s just not an overwhelmingly offensive shot. Iga Swiatek wins 60% of those points; Aryna Sabalenka wins 58%. Shnaider, like Iga, wins nearly 60% of them, claiming two of three against Zhu and more than three out of four against Wang.
She’s not killing the ball, not most of the time anyway. But it doesn’t matter. Her crosscourt forehand is the tennis equivalent of death by a thousand cuts.
Adjustment periods
Shnaider’s game is a work in progress, no criticism for a 19-year-old who balanced college tennis with the tour for half of last year. She will almost certainly develop more power, especially on the serve, where there is a wide gap between her biggest strikes and her more pedestrian offerings. She will probably also learn to take more chances from the baseline, an adjustment that would give her more control over her own fate.
On a smaller scale, each one of her three seeded opponents last week threatened to take control of their encounters; each time, the left-hander recovered in time to advance.
Linette, as we’ve seen, had no problem with the barrage of crosscourt forehands. After Shnaider won the opening frame, the top seed roared back with a 6-1 second. From there, though, the Russian was a different player. She sent more first serves to the wide corners–reliable weapons for many a left-hander–which sealed the first game of the decider with the loss of just one point. She also moved away from the crosscourt forehand, letting Linette test her own backhand with crosscourt forehands of her own. At 30-40 in the Pole’s first service game of the decider, Linette hit her plus-one shot down the middle. Where Shnaider might prefer to attack crosscourt, she instead went inside-out, setting herself up for a backhand crosscourt winner on the following shot. Linette would break back in the following game, but her momentum was broken. Shnaider had opened up new tactical options and would take the third set, 6-1.
Wang’s threat was less serious, but it represents bigger dangers that the 19-year-old will face on tour. Shnaider won the first set easily, aided by Wang’s own mistakes. But the Chinese player brought her power under control at the beginning of the second, breaking for a 3-1 advantage. The fourth game demonstrated what a big hitter can do: Wang needed only five shots to reach 40-30. There wasn’t anything to push around.
While Wang wasn’t exactly dominant on serve, she was good enough. The only way to handle a (temporarily) unbreakable server is to take care of your own deal, and Shnaider did her best. She took more chances with first serves, seeing that number fall below 50%, compared to a usual rate above 60%. When she was able to extend rallies, she let Wang make mistakes. The second-set tiebreak ended with a combination of the two: At 4-5, Wang missed a swinging volley to end a 20-stroke rally. Two points later, Shnaider cracked a wide first serve that didn’t come back.
Zhu Lin proved to be the knottiest problem of the three top seeds, even if she didn’t play the best tennis. Though Zhu doesn’t have big weapons, she knows the dangers of passive tennis, especially against someone like Shnaider who will push her around. After the first set went to the Russian, 6-3, Zhu did everything she could to shorten points. For one set, it worked:
RALLY LEN Shots/Pt
Set 1 4.6
Set 2 3.7
Set 3 4.6
Zhu picked up the second set, 6-2, in large part because Shnaider reacted so badly to the shift. After balancing winners and unforced errors in the first set, the 19-year-old hit just two winners against ten errors–including six on the forehand–in the second.
When the deciding set began, it was as if both players realized that Zhu couldn’t keep playing with borrowed tactics. Shnaider continued to put service returns close to the baseline–her Return Depth Index was 2.83, by far the best of the charted matches in her career so far–making it more difficult for Zhu to attack. Her forehand recovered, ensuring that she would keep points alive. A better player, or one with more experience, might have reacted to Zhu’s shift more quickly, but it is to Shnaider’s credit that she did so, so comprehensively, well before the clock ran out. The Russian concluded her title run with a 6-1 final set.
If the course of this week’s triumph is any indication, Shnaider’s march to the top of the rankings will be a steady one. She has too much to figure out before she consistently beats the best, and that will take time. But her run of upsets in Hua Hin showed us that she is making progress, and that her in-match problem-solving skills far surpass those of the typical 19-year-old. As the problems get tougher, we’ll find out just how far she can go.
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Alexander Bublik’s four comebacks
Alexander Bublik won the Montpellier title the hard way, coming back from one-set deficits against all four of his opponents. It’s the first time anyone has ever won an ATP title despite losing the first set of each of his matches. It’s never happened on the Challenger tour, either.
However, the key word here is four. Bublik was the second seed in Montpellier, so he didn’t have to play a first-round match. No titlist has ever lost the first set in all of their matches, but many players have won a tournament despite losing four first sets.
I found 20 previous occasions when a player came back so often at the same event, en route to a title. (Presumably there are even more, if we look for finalists, quarter- and semi-finalists at majors, and so on.) Bublik was the first since 2009, when Radek Stepanek recorded back-to-back wins against Andy Roddick and Mardy Fish to claim the San Jose title. He recovered from a one-set deficit four times, straight-setting only Chris Guccione.
The feat was more common at the beginning of the century, occuring twice each in 2001 and 2002. Tommy Haas recorded four comebacks on the way to a title at the 2001 Stuttgart Masters, the single Masters-level title run on this list. His only straight-set victory was the best-of-five final against Max Mirnyi. Nicolas Escude won Rotterdam in 2002 against an all-star cast including Roger Federer, Juan Carlos Ferrero, Tim Henman, Sebastien Grosjean, and Tommy Robredo, losing the first set to all but Robredo. Don’t be too hard on Tommy, though: He took the first set from Paul-Henri Mathieu in Moscow the same year, where Mathieu dropped four first sets yet still took home the trophy.
Two major winners appear on this list: John McEnroe for his 1981 US Open run, and Andre Agassi for his 1992 championship at Wimbledon (where, in another coincidence, he beat McEnroe in the semis). Those feats aren’t really in the same category as Bublik’s, as they had seven chances to come back. On the other hand, McEnroe recovered from a one-set deficit against Bjorn Borg, so I’m not about to disqualify him from anything.
Finally, there’s one oddball occasion that–if you squint hard enough–really is a precedent for Montpellier last week. Emilio Sanchez led Spain to the 1992 World Team Cup title, beating Stefan Edberg, Guy Forget, and Jakob Hlasek in the round robin, then defeating Petr Korda in the final round. In each one, he came back after losing the first set. It’s not quite the same thing, but Sanchez went home a hero, and he came back in all four of his matches. Whether it qualifies or not, it was one hell of a week.
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Shnaider’s top-three upsets
As I mentioned at the top of today’s post, Diana Shnaider went through the first, second, and third three seeds in Hua Hin en route to the title. (Unlike Bublik, she won all five of her first sets, too.) She beat top seed Magda Linette in the first round, third-seeded Wang Xinyu in the semi-finals, and second seed Zhu Lin in the final.
Shnaider’s feat is not so rare as Bublik’s. Excluding year-end tour championships, where seeds clash in every match, Hua Hin is the sixth time in a decade that player has gone through the top three seeds to win the title. Remarkably, Barbora Krejcikova has done it twice in two years, beating Anett Kontaveit, Belinda Bencic, and Beatriz Haddad Maia to win Tallinn in 2022, then upsetting Aryna Sabalenka, Jessica Pegula, and Iga Swiatek (not to mention seventh-seed Daria Kasatkina and twelvth-seed Petra Kvitova) to win Dubai last year.
The list of previous such winners is a glittering one, usually when a superstar returns from a prolonged absence. Serena Williams beat Martina Hingis, Jennifer Capriati, and sister Venus to win Miami in 2002. Steffi Graf won the 1999 French Open by knocking out Lindsay Davenport, Monica Seles, and Hingis in succession.
Graf wasn’t the first player to win a major title in such a fashion: Virginia Wade picked up the first US Open, in 1968, by eliminating Judy Tegart, Ann Jones, and Billie Jean King.
Conchita Martinez is probably the best player who won a title this way when she was still on the rise: She upset Sabrina Goles, Katerina Maleeva, and Barbara Paulus to pick up the 1988 Sofia crown. Hana Mandlikova, like Krejcikova, did it twice: At the 1984 Oakland tourney, she beat Andrea Jaeger, Pam Shriver, and Martina Navratilova. She returned the next year and did it again, knocking out Wendy Turnbull, Helena Sukova, and Chris Evert.
Finally, a twist: Margaret Court also appears on the list twice. Shortly after returning from her first pregnancy, she won the 1972 Newport title–where she was seeded sixth–with victories over Rosie Casals, Evert, and King. The odder instance is her other appearance, for the Locust Valley (New York) event in 1969. Court plowed through top seeds Denise Carter, Patti Hogan, and Betty Ann Grubb, losing just 12 games in the process.
Margaret had already won two majors that year–so why wasn’t she the top seed? Traditionally, foreign players were placed on a separate seeding list. Carter, Hogan, and Grubb were the top three Americans at the rather weak event. Court was designated 1F–the top foreign seed, ahead of 2F Kerry Harris, with whom she won the doubles, too. Foreign seeds were placed in the draw so they would avoid local seeds (and each other) until later rounds. So this example doesn’t really count: By modern standards, Court was herself the top seed, and Harris probably outranked one or more of the Americans.
Even if we toss out Locust Valley, Shnaider finds herself in good company. She joins Wade, Court, Mandlikova, Martinez, Graf, Amelie Mauresmo, Serena, and–thanks to a sparkling week in Luxembourg in 2016–the great Monica Niculescu.
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Last night, Caroline Garcia scored what many fans saw as an upset, straight-setting two-time Australian Open champion Naomi Osaka. While Garcia was seeded 16th and Osaka is just beginning a comeback, no one ever knows quite what to expect when the Frenchwoman takes the court. The former champ, for her part, has always been at her best on big stages.
The result was almost pedestrian. Garcia turned in a performance that exemplified the tennis of her late 20s: Serving big, returning pugnaciously, taking risks, and–on the rare occasions that Osaka left her an opening–net rushing. Osaka served well, but the 16th seed out-aced her, 13 to 11. More than three-quarters of points were decided in three shots or less, and Garcia stole a few more of those from her opponent than Osaka did from her. In a contest defined by small margins–one break of serve and a tiebreak–that was all it took.
The strange thing is, Caro didn’t use to play like this. She plays shorter points than any other tour regular, an average of 2.9 shots per point in charted matches from the last 52 weeks. It isn’t just about her powerful first serve: Her return points end even sooner than her serve points do. Back in 2018, when she first reached her career-best ranking of 4th on the WTA computer, she was averaging over four shots per point, a rally length that would put her in the range of Jessica Pegula and Maria Sakkari: in other words, a very different sort of player.
Here is the evolution of Garcia’s rally length, shown as a rolling 10-match average, for the 84 matches in the charting dataset:
Last night’s rally length was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it 2.5 shots, the second-lowest figure I have on record for Garcia. Only a match against Donna Vekic last year comes in slightly lower, though last week’s match in Adelaide against Jelena Ostapenko may have been even more extreme. Osaka’s big game helped keep the number down, but it takes two to so comprehensively avoid the long-rally tango.
Garcia’s first serve has always been a weapon. But her tactical approach behind it has fluctuated wildly. The career trend of her Aggression Score in rallies illustrates how she has careened from one extreme to another. Aggression Score is scaled so that the most passive players rate around -100 and the most aggressive around 100, though Ostapenko and others have pushed the maximum figures further into triple digits. Here is how Garcia’s score has changed over time, again as rolling ten-match averages:
I don’t think there any other player in tennis–man or woman, past or present–who has followed a path like this. As she established herself as an elite on tour, even as she rose into the top five, she became more and more conservative. For reference, players who posted scores around zero in 2023 were Sakkari and Martina Trevisan, hardly styles that will remind you of Garcia’s. Eventually she reversed course, not only regaining her former style but surpassing it, ranking among Liudmila Samsonova and Aryna Sabalenka as one of the most aggressive players on tour, a rung below the class-of-her-own Ostapenko.
Is it working?
The oddest thing about the multiple phases of Garcia’s career is that she has reached the No. 4 ranking with two different styles. In each of her first three charted matches after achieving the peak ranking in 2018, she posted negative rally aggression scores. In two matches against Sabalenka, she averaged 3.9 and 3.7 shots per point; against Karolina Pliskova in the Tianjin final, the typical point lasted 4.3 strokes. When she returned to the No. 4 ranking at the end of 2022, after years in the wilderness, she was frequently posting triple-digit aggression scores and average rally lengths below 3.
The main effect of Garcia’s current style is that it makes the most of her serve. From 2015 to 2017, she won just over 66% of her first-serve points, a mark that is good but sub-elite. She fell all the way to 62% in 2021 before the big shift; since then, she has won more than 70% of her first-serve points. She ranked fourth in that stat heading into the Australian Open, and she converted nearly 90% of her first serves against Osaka. Her success behind the second serve hasn’t shown the same improvement, but the overall picture is a good one: She won more total serve points in 2023 than ever before.
The return game is a different story. This is where even a casual viewer can’t miss Caro’s new tactics: She’s not afraid to stand well inside the baseline to return serve, and yesterday she net-rushed one Osaka serve, SABR-style. Measured by court position, if not by winners and error stats, Garcia is even more aggressive than Ostapenko.
At her best, the Frenchwoman posted acceptable return numbers, if not great ones. Her best single-season mark, winning 42.7% of her return points in 2017, put her in the bottom third of top-50 players. As she has upped the intensity of her attack, this key number has headed south:
In the last 52 weeks, she has won just 38.3% of return points, worst among the top 50 by two full percentage points. Among the top 20, no one else is below 42%. She can get away with it because her own serve is so rarely broken, but such ineffectual return results will make it difficult to mount another assault on the top five. Breaking serve so rarely dooms her to a career of three-setters and narrow decisions. Those sorts of results can sometimes be encouraging–as in her pair of recent three-set losses to Iga Swiatek–but have a knack for halting winning streaks, too.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Players don’t sign contracts agreeing to deploy the same tactics on both sides of the ball. Garcia won return games far more often in her less aggressive days, breaking 33% of the time in 2017 compared to a dreadful 23% last year.
Some of Caro’s 2017 skills are still in evidence. She is solid enough in long rallies that she doesn’t need to so actively avoid them: In the last year, she has won a respectable 48% of points that lasted seven or more strokes, and if you remove the two Swiatek matches, she breaks even. While the Osaka match was primarily determined by short points, Garcia won 17 of 29 (59%) that went to a fourth shot.
Without any major changes, Garcia will remain the sort of player who aggravates fans and opponents alike, a dangerous lurker capable of delivering upsets, inexplicable marathons, and lame early exits in equal measure. Like any hyper-aggressive player, Caro’s results can be seemingly random, with all the frustration that entails. Unlike Ostapenko, Sabalenka, and the many ball-bashers on tour, though, Garcia has chosen to play this way, rebuilding her game into something that the 2018 version of herself would hardly recognize. If she can somehow join her late-career serve to her earlier return-game tactics, the randomness will disappear, and Caro may make yet another appearance in the top five.
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An underhand serve functions in two ways–one short term, one long term. The short-term goal is to win a single point. Your opponent is standing way back, and the service equivalent of a drop shot could go for a 50 mile-per-hour ace. The long-term goal is to give your opponent something to worry about, perhaps distracting him or changing his return position for games, or sets to come. It’s not about winning a single point, but about slightly improving your odds in many future points.
In his second-round match yesterday against Ugo Humbert at the Australian Open, Nick Kyrgios opted for both. He unleashed the underhander twice, once at 40-love in his second service game, and again at 5-5, 40-30 in the fourth set.
The first dropper was on as meaningless a point as he could ask for. Kyrgios’s probability of winning a service game from 40-love is about 99.6% (really!), so the risk of losing the game after throwing away a point is essentially nil. He won the point with a backhand winner on his next shot, but the object of the exercise–assuming there was a tactical one, and I’ll give Nick the benefit of the doubt here–was more long-term oriented.
He delivered the second underarm serve on a much higher-pressure point. Kyrgios is still heavily favored to hold serve from 40-30, but he could be forgiven for feeling some nerves and wishing for a free point. This time he netted the underhand attempt and ended up winning the point after a (conventional) second serve.
A drop of data
When the underhand serve first started to go mainstream a couple of years ago, I updated the Match Charting Project spreadsheet to allow us to track these attempts. Counting the Kyrgios-Humbert match, we’ve now gathered the results of 35 drop-serve attempts across 20 different men’s matches. (We’ve recorded many women’s underhand serves as well, but most of those belong to Sara Errani, who has a different set of goals when she goes that route.)
35 points is awfully far from big data, but it is enough to get a taste of how a handful of players are deploying this unorthodox weapon.
The most common point score for an underarm serve is 40-love. Of the 35 attempts, 40-love accounts for 12 of them. Another 4 occured at 40-15, plus two more at 30-love, so roughly half of the recorded drop serves came with a service game more or less secured. A few of the remaining points were also relatively unimportant ones, like Daniil Medvedev’s underhander at love-40 toward the end of a 2019 US Open match against Hugo Dellien, and Alexander Bublik’s back-to-back tries at 0-5 and 1-5 in a tiebreak against John Isner.
Bublik is the major source of unimportant-point underarm serving. He’s responsible for 19 of the recorded points, 16 of which were at 40-love, 40-15, 30-love, or those two tiebreak points I just mentioned.
Inferring tactics
Since so many underarm serves are deployed at low-pressure moments, it’s tempting to conclude that players are thinking long term.
On the other hand, our handful of recorded underhand deliveries–even the ones on 40-love points–don’t skew toward the beginning of matches. We have two charted matches in which Robin Haase tried an underhander: a 2019 Budapest tilt against Borna Coric in which he made his first attempt in the third game, and a 2020 Davis Cup rubber when he waited until the 32nd game of the match.
Poster boy Bublik is inconsistent on this as well. Twice he has brought out the underhander in his second service game–once in the Newport match versus Isner, and another time the same summer in Washington against Bradley Klahn. Yet at the US Open against Thomas Fabbiano the same year, he didn’t unleash the secret weapon until 40-love in the 32nd game of the match.
I’ll admit, it might be foolish to try to detect the grand plan underlying the behavior of Alexander Bublik.
But it works!
Yeah, our 35 points make up tiny sample, but… the server won 27 of these 35 points! That’s 77%, and it includes underarm first-serve attempts that missed. When players had to hit a conventional second serve, they still won 7 of 10 points–a rate of second serve points won that any player would happily accept.
These numbers–cautiously as we must treat them–suggest that the underarm serve trend has plenty of room to run. The rare players who dare to risk ridicule are still only using the drop serve less than twice per match, and of course the vast majority of men on tour are never hitting them at all. The more common the underhand delivery becomes, the less effective it will be, but there’s a lot of space between the current drop-serve win percentage of 77% and the typical player’s success rate on serve. Tour average is around 65%, and only the most dominant servers exceed 70%.
As Bublik and friends have discovered, there’s little risk in mixing things up. Strong servers like him and Kyrgios have plenty of low-leverage opportunities to remind their opponents that surprises could be in store later in the match, when the stakes are raised. Our very early indicators suggest that where Kyrgios has gone, the rest of the tour could profitably follow.
Tennis players like routine, so maybe that’s what makes left-handed opponents “tricky.” The phrase “tricky lefty” is so common as to be a cliché, leading me to ask on Twitter last night whether there’s such a thing as a lefty who aren’t described as tricky.
A few of you responded, suggesting names such as Petra Kvitova and Rafael Nadal. It’s true, great left-handed players win matches because they’re great, not because they’re unusual. Plenty of adjectives come to mind for Petra and Rafa before “tricky.” Tour coach Marc Lucero suggested a broader framework:
Left handed power players aren’t tricky. Kvitova, Nadal, Klahn, Verdasco, Lopez. Smaller or Spinny or counter puncher type players : always tricky
I suspect Marc is right, and he would know better than I would. It doesn’t make sense that all lefties are tricky, even if players don’t face them very often.
Let’s be pedantic and go back to my original question, though: Are there any lefties who aren’t described as tricky? Mihaela Buzarnescu is certainly no Kvitova, but she is more aggressive than the average WTAer, at least according to Match Charting Project stats. To answer this question, I did some hardcore 21st-century research and googled it.
More specifically, I googled the following:
“tricky lefty” tennis
That’s not a perfect filter, because it excludes things like “tricky left-hander,” “a lefty whose tricky game…” and so on. But it gives us a good overview. Skipping over results with instructional content (“how to handle a tricky lefty serve!”) and pages discussing amateur players, here are the first 27 players Google told me are tricky lefties:
Alas, the world’s content writers do not hold to Lucero’s logically consistent definition. While some of the examples that Google gave me come from blogs, which we might not expect to maintain high editorial standards (pot, kettle, etc), one of the mentions of Nadal’s trickiness came from a very respectable publication, written by a pundit whose name you would know. Many of the other players were described as tricky on the tour websites, or in direct quotes from players. (Caroline Wozniacki used the t-word for Buzarnescu.)
Are lefties tricky?
As I said at the outset, tennis players like routine. Unless you’ve reached the finals at Roland Garros, facing a lefty is out of the ordinary. It’s the same type of unusual as drawing an opponent with a monster serve (Ivo Karlovic is incessantly deemed “tricky”) or a finely-honed backhand slice. There’s a whole range of tired tennis tropes for the underspinners–they “slice and dice” (really? they chop up the tennis balls into small cubes?), and their trickiness is rivaled only by how “crafty” they are.
We can’t quantify this unless we reframe the question. If lefties are tricky–or, let’s say, they have more capacity to be tricky than right-handers do–it’s roughly equivalent to saying that left-handers have an advantage. And if southpaws have an edge, we’d expect to see more of them in high-level tennis than in the population as a whole.
Is there a disproportionate number of lefties? This was one of the first tennis analytics questions I tried to answer, almost exactly a decade ago, and my conclusion then was: not really.
In February 2011, 12 of the top 100 players in the ATP rankings were left-handed. That includes Nadal, who complicates things a bit, as he’s a natural righty. 10% of the population is left-handed, so 11 natural-born lefties out of 100 players is awfully close to what we’d expect if there was no advantage.
Don’t read too much into this, but things have changed a bit! At the moment, 15 of the top 100 ATPers are left-handed. (Still including Rafa, of course.) There’s only about a 4% chance that there would be so many lefties purely due to chance, or 7% if you class Rafa with the natural-born righties. It’s hardly a statistical slam dunk, and the case gets weaker when we broaden our view. There are 12 lefties among the next hundred male players, and only 18 lefties–fewer than we’d expect from chance alone–in the WTA top 200.
Paradoxically, the more lefty regulars on tour, the less uncomfortable they are to face. Put another way, the trickier they are, the less tricky they are.
There may well be an advantage to left-handedness, and its inherent trickery, in the junior or amateur ranks. (There is certainly an advantage when facing me!) But the evidence is flimsy that it extends to the highest level of the game. The real trick would be convincing everyone to start using a different adjective or–gasp!–treating non-superstar lefties as individuals with games that aren’t interchangeable, even if they do all use the same dominant hand.
With rallies short and aggressive, should players be using practice time differently? What types of skills can still be improved, once a player has reached the top? What tactics can a coach teach their charges, and which ones are too deeply ingrained in the physical nature of hitting the shots? The line between technique and tactics may not be a clear-cut as we think.
Is a 3- or 4-shot rally qualitatively different from a 5- or more-shot rally? How would you teach Madison Keys to retain the positives of her aggressive style while dialing back the aggression a bit? We offer more questions than answers, which seems appropriate for a topic that is far from settled, and is likely to remain controversial for years to come.
Thanks for listening!
(Note: this week’s episode is about 67 minutes long; in some browsers the audio player may display a different length. Sorry about that!)
Long after retiring from tennis, Marat Safin remains quotable. The Russian captain at the ATP Cup had this to say to his charge, Karen Khachanov, during a match against Taylor Fritz:
🤣🤣🤣 Safin to Khachanov on typical US player's approach to the game:
They employ shock-and-awe tactics and want to scare you with one-two shots. Once you drag them into the rally they are screwed.
This isn’t exactly testable. I don’t know you’d quantify “shock-and-awe,” or how to identify–let alone measure–attempts to scare one’s opponent. Or screwed-ness, for that matter. But if we take “screwed” to mean the same as “not very likely to win,” we’ve got something we can check.
Many fans would agree with the general claim that American men tend to have big serves, aggressive game styles, and not a whole lot of subtlety. Certainly John Isner fits that mold, and Sam Querrey doesn’t deviate much from it. While Fritz is a big hitter who racks up his share of aces and second-shot putaways, his style isn’t so one-dimensional.
Taylor Fritz: not screwed
Using data from the Match Charting Project, I calculated some rally-length stats for the 70 men with at least 20 charted matches in the last decade. That includes five Americans (Fritz, Isner, Querrey, Steve Johnson, and Jack Sock) and most of the other guys we think of as ATP tour regulars.
Safin’s implied definition is that rallies of four shots or fewer are “shock-and-awe” territory, points that are won or lost within either player’s first two shots. Longer rallies are, supposedly, the points where the Americans lose the edge.
That is certainly the case for Isner. He wins only 40% of points when the rally reaches a fifth shot, by far the worst of these tour regulars. Compared to Isner, even Nick Kyrgios (44%) and Ivo Karlovic (45%) look respectable. The range of winning percentages extends as high as 56%, the mark held by Nikoloz Basilashvili. Rafael Nadal is, unsurprisingly, right behind him in second place at 54%, a whisker ahead of Novak Djokovic.
Fritz, at 50.2%, ranks 28th out of 70, roughly equal to the likes of Gael Monfils, Roberto Bautista Agut, and Dominic Thiem. Best of all–if you’re a contrarian like me, anyway–is that Fritz is almost 20 places higher on the list than Khachanov, who wins 48.5% of points that last five shots or more.
More data
Here are 20 of the 70 players, including some from the top and bottom of the list, along with all the Americans and some other characters of interest. I’ve calculated each player’s percentage of points won for 1- or 2-shot rallies (serve and return winners), 3- or 4-shot rallies (serve- and return-plus-one points), and 5- or more-shot rallies. They are ranked by the 5- or more-shot column:
Rank Player 1-2 W% 3-4 W% 5+ W%
1 Nikoloz Basilashvili 43.7% 54.1% 55.8%
2 Rafael Nadal 52.7% 51.6% 54.3%
3 Novak Djokovic 51.8% 54.6% 54.0%
4 Kei Nishikori 45.5% 51.2% 53.9%
11 Roger Federer 52.9% 54.9% 52.1%
22 Philipp Kohlschreiber 50.1% 50.1% 50.7%
28 Taylor Fritz 51.1% 47.2% 50.2%
30 Jack Sock 49.0% 46.5% 50.2%
31 Alexander Zverev 52.8% 50.3% 50.0%
32 Juan Martin del Potro 53.8% 49.1% 50.0%
34 Andy Murray 54.3% 49.5% 49.4%
39 Daniil Medvedev 53.9% 50.4% 49.0%
43 Stefanos Tsitsipas 51.4% 50.5% 48.6%
44 Karen Khachanov 53.7% 48.1% 48.5%
48 Steve Johnson 49.2% 48.8% 48.3%
61 Sam Querrey 53.5% 48.0% 46.2%
62 Matteo Berrettini 53.6% 49.3% 46.1%
66 Ivo Karlovic 51.8% 43.9% 44.9%
68 Nick Kyrgios 54.6% 47.4% 44.2%
70 John Isner 52.3% 48.3% 40.2%
Fritz is one of the few players who win more than half of the shortest rallies and more than half of the longest ones. The first category can be the result of a strong serve, as is probably the case with Fritz, and is definitely the case with Isner. But you don’t have to have a big serve to win more than half of the 1- or 2-shot points. Nadal and Djokovic do well in that category (like they do in virtually all categories) in large part because they negate the advantage of their opponents’ serves.
Shifting focus from the Americans for a moment, you might be surprised by the players with positive winning percentages in all three categories. Nadal, Djokovic, and Roger Federer all make the cut, each with plenty of room to spare. The remaining two are the unexpected ones. Philipp Kohlschreiber is just barely better than neutral in both classes of short points, and a bit better than that (50.7%) on long ones. And Alexander Zverev qualifies by the skin of his teeth, winning very slightly more than half of his long rallies. (Yes, that 50.0% is rounded down, not up.) Match Charting Project data is far from complete, so it’s possible that with a different sample, one or both of the Germans would fall below the 50% mark, but the numbers for both are based on sizable datasets.
Back to Fritz, Isner, and company. Safin may be right that the Americans want to scare you with a couple of big shots. Isner has certainly intimidated his share of opponents with the serve alone. Yet Fritz, the player who prompted the comment, is more well-rounded than the Russian captain gave him credit for. Khachanov won the match on Sunday, and at least at this stage in their careers, the Russian is the better player. But not on longer rallies. Based on our broader look at the data, it’s Khachanov who should try to avoid getting dragged into long exchanges, not Fritz.
Earlier this week I presented a lot of data about what happens when men face a makeable ball hit to their backhand corner. That post was itself a follow-up on a previous look at what happened when players of both genders attempted down-the-line backhands. You don’t need to read those two articles to know what’s going on in this one, but if you’re interested in the topic, you’ll probably find them worthwhile.
Decision-making in the backhand corner is one of the biggest differences between pro men and women. Let me illustrate in the nerdiest way possible, with bug reports from the code I wrote to assemble these numbers. My first stab at the code to aggregate player-by-player numbers for men failed because some men never hit a topspin backhand from the backhand corner. At least, not in any match recorded by the Match Charting Project. The offending player who generated those divide-by-zero errors was Sam Groth. In his handful of charted matches, he relied entirely on the slice, at least in those rare cases where rallies extended beyond the return of serve.
Compare with the bug that slowed me down in preparing this post. The problematic player this time was Evgeniya Rodina. In nine charted matches, she has yet to hit a forehand from the backhand corner. If your backhand is the better shot, why would you run around it? Of the nearly 200 players with five charted matches from the 2010s, Rodina is the only one with zero forehands. But she isn’t really an outlier. 23 other women hit fewer than 10 forehands in all of their charted matches, including Timea Bacsinszky, who opted for the forehand only four times in 32 matches.
Faced with a makeable ball in the backhand corner, men and women both hit a non-slice groundstroke about four-fifths of the time. But of those topspin and flat strokes, women stick with the backhand 94% of the time, compared to 82% for men.
A few WTA players seek out opportunities to run around their backhands, including Sam Stosur and Polona Hercog, both of whom hit the forehand 20% of the time they are pushed into the backhand corner. Ashleigh Barty also displays more Federer-like tactics than most of her peers, using the forehand 13% of the time. Yet most of the women with powerful forehands, like Serena Williams, have equal or better backhands, making it counter-productive to run around the shot. Serena hits a forehand only 1% of the time her opponent sends a makeable ball into her backhand corner.
Directional decisions
Backhand or forehand, let’s start by looking at which specific shot that players chose. The Match Charting Project contains shot-by-shot logs of about 2,900 women’s matches from the 2010s, including 365,000 makeable balls hit to one player’s backhand corner. (“Makeable” is defined as a ball that either came back or resulted in an unforced error.)
Here is the frequency with which players hit backhand and forehands in different directions from their backhand corner. I’ve included the ATP numbers for comparison:
BH Direction WTA Freq ATP Freq
Down the line 17.4% 17.4%
Down the middle 35.2% 29.5%
Cross-court 47.3% 52.9%
FH Direction WTA Freq ATP Freq
Down the line (inside-in) 35.2% 35.1%
Down the middle 16.2% 12.8%
Cross-court (inside-out) 48.4% 51.8%
Once a forehand or backhand is chosen, there isn’t much difference between men and women. Women go up the middle a bit more often, which may partly be a function of using the topspin or flat backhand in defensive positions slightly more than men do. I’ve also observed that today’s top women are more likely to hit an aggressive shot down the middle than men are. The level of aggression and risk may be similar to that of a bullet aimed at a corner, but when we classify by direction, it looks a bit more conservative. That’s just a theory, however, so we’ll have to test that another day.
Point probability
Things get more interesting when we look at how these choices affect the likelihood of winning the point. On average, a woman faced with a makeable ball in her backhand corner has a 47.2% chance of winning the point. (For men, it’s 47.7%.) The serve has some effect on the potency those shots toward the backhand corner. If the makeable ball was a service return–presumably weaker than the average groundstroke–the probability of winning the point is 48.2%. If the makeable ball is one shot later, an often-aggressive “serve-plus-one” shot, the chances of fighting back and winning the point are only 46.3%. It’s not a huge difference, but it is a reminder that the context of any given shot can affect these probabilities.
The various decisions available to players each have their own effect on the probability of winning the point, at least on average. If a woman chooses to hit a down-the-line backhand, her likelihood of winning the point increases to 53.0%. If she makes that shot, her odds rise to 68.4%.
The following table shows those probabilities for every decision. The first column of percentages, “Post-Shot,” indicates the likelihood of winning after making the decision–the 53.0% I just mentioned. The second column, “In-Play,” is the chance of winning if she makes that shot, like 68.4% for the down-the-line backhand.
The down-the-line shots are risky, so the gap between the two probabilities is a big one. There is little difference between Post-Shot and In-Play for down-the-middle shots, because they almost always go in. For the forehand probabilities, keep in mind that they are skewed by the selection of players who choose to use their forehands more often. Your mileage may vary, especially if you play like Rodina does.
Cautious recommendations
Looking at this table, you might wonder why a player would ever make certain shot selections. The likelihood of winning the point before choosing a wing or direction is 47.2%, so why go with a backhand down the middle (44.6%) when you could hit an inside-in forehand (61.4%)? It’s not the risk of missing, because that’s baked into the numbers.
One obvious reason is that it isn’t always possible to hit the most rewarding shot. Even the most aggressive men run around only about one-quarter of their backhands, suggesting that it would be impractical to hit a forehand on the remaining three-quarters of opportunities. That wipes out half of the choices I’ve listed. And even a backhand wizard such as Simona Halep can’t hit lasers down the line at will. The probabilities reflect what happened when players thought the shot was the best option available to them. Even though were occasionally wrong, this is very, very far from a randomized controlled trial in which a scientist told players to hit a down-the-line backhand no matter what the nature of the incoming shot.
Another complication is one that I’ve already mentioned: The success rates for rarer shots, like inside-in forehands, reflect how things turned out for players who chose to hit them. That is, for players who consider them to be weapons. It might be amusing to watch Monica Niculescu hit inside-out topspin forehands at every opportunity, but it almost certainly wouldn’t improve her chances of winning. You only get those rosy forehand numbers if you can hit a forehand like Stosur does.
That said, the table does drive home the point that conservative shot selection has an effect on the probability of winning points. Some women are happy sending backhand after backhand up the middle of the court, and sometimes that’s all you can do. But when more options are available, the riskier choices can be more rewarding.
Player probabilities
Let’s wrap up for today by taking a player-by-player look at these numbers. We established that the average player has a 47.2% chance of winning the point when a makeable shot is arcing toward her backhand corner. Even though Tsvetana Pironkova’s number is also 47.2%, no player is average. Here are the top 14 players–minimum ten charted matches, ranked by the probability of winning a point from that position. I’ve also included the frequency with which they hit non-slice backhands:
Player Post-Shot BH Freq
Kim Clijsters 53.4% 77.6%
Na Li 53.2% 87.5%
Camila Giorgi 52.9% 93.8%
Patricia Maria Tig 52.1% 66.1%
Simona Halep 52.1% 83.6%
Belinda Bencic 51.5% 91.7%
Dominika Cibulkova 51.3% 70.1%
Veronika Kudermetova 50.9% 73.9%
Jessica Pegula 50.7% 73.7%
Su-Wei Hsieh 50.6% 81.8%
Dayana Yastremska 50.6% 87.6%
Anna Karolina Schmiedlova 50.3% 87.4%
Serena Williams 49.9% 89.2%
Sara Errani 49.8% 70.0%
These numbers are from the 2010s only, so they don’t encompass the entire careers of the top two players on the list, Kim Clijsters and Li Na. It is particularly impressive that they make the cut, because their charted matches are not a random sample–they heavily tilt toward high-profile clashes against top opponents. The remainder of the list is a mixed bag of elites and journeywomen, backhand bashers and crafty strategists.
Next are the players with the best chances of winning the point after hitting a forehand from the backhand corner. I’ve drawn the line at 100 charted forehands, a minimum that limits our pool to about 50 players:
Player Post-Shot FH Freq
Maria Sharapova 69.0% 4.1%
Dominika Cibulkova 65.1% 10.5%
Ana Ivanovic 64.7% 11.1%
Yafan Wang 64.4% 8.8%
Rebecca Peterson 63.4% 15.2%
Simona Halep 63.1% 6.8%
Carla Suarez Navarro 63.0% 7.7%
Andrea Petkovic 62.3% 5.3%
Christina McHale 61.9% 15.2%
Anastasija Sevastova 61.3% 4.2%
Petra Kvitova 60.8% 4.6%
Caroline Garcia 60.7% 7.5%
Misaki Doi 60.5% 17.0%
Madison Keys 59.3% 9.3%
Elina Svitolina 59.1% 3.9%
Maria Sharapova is the Gilles Simon of the WTA. (Now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write!) Both players usually opt for the backhand, but are extremely effective when they go for the forehand. Kudos to Sharapova for her well-judged attacks, though it could be that she’s leaving some points on the table by not running around her backhand more often.
Next
As I wrote on Thursday, we’re still just scratching the surface of what can be done with Match Charting Project data to analyze tactics such as this one. A particular area of interest is to break down backhand-corner opportunities (or chances anywhere on the court) even further. The average point probability of 47.2% surely does not hold if we look at makeable balls that started life as, say, inside-out forehands. If some players are facing more tough chances, we should view those numbers differently.
If you’ve gotten this far, you must be interested. The Match Charting Project has accumulated shot-by-shot logs of nearly 7,000 matches. It’s a huge number, but we could always use more. Many up and coming players have only a few matches charted, and many interesting matches of the past (like most of those played by Li and Clijsters!) remain unlogged. You can help, and if you like watching and analyzing tennis, you should.
A few weeks ago, I offered a “first look” at the down-the-line backhand. I offered a stack of Match Charting Project-based stats showing how often players opted to play that shot, what happened when they did, how lefties differ from righties, and which players stood out thanks to the frequency or success of their down-the-line strikes.
Like Richard Gasquet returning a serve, we need to take a step back before we can move forward. Rather than continuing to focus solely on the down-the-line backhand, let’s expand our view to all shots played from the backhand corner. The DTL backhand is only one choice among many. A player in position to go down the line has the option of a cross-court shot or a more conservative reply up the middle. She also might run around the backhand entirely, taking aim with a forehand up the line (“inside-in”), down the middle, or cross-court (“inside-out”).
Every shot is a choice, and one of the roles of analytics is to analyze the pros and cons of decisions players make. Ideally, we would even be able to identify cases in which pros make poor choices and recommend better ones. We’re still many steps away from that, at least in any kind of systematic way. But thanks to the thousands of matches with shot-by-shot data logged by the Match Charting Project, we have plenty of raw material to help us get closer.
The first choice
In 2,700 charted men’s matches from the last decade (happy new year!), I isolated about 450,000 situations in which one player had a makeable ball in his backhand corner, excluding service returns. The definition of “makeable” is inherently a bit messy. For today’s purposes, a makeable ball is one that the player managed to return or one that turned into an unforced error. With ball-tracking data, we could be more precise, but for now we need to accept this level of imprecision.
Of the 450,000 makeable backhand-corner balls, players hit (non-slice) backhands 63.7% of the time and (non-slice) forehands 14.3% of the time. The remaining 22% were divvied up among slices, dropshots, and lobs, and we’ll set those aside for another day.
Here’s how 2010s men chose to aim their backhands from the backhand corner:
Down the line: 17.4%
Down the middle: 29.5%
Cross-court: 52.9%
And their forehands from the same position:
Down the line (inside-in): 35.1%
Down the middle: 12.8%
Cross-court (inside-out): 51.8%
The inside-in percentage is a bit surprising at first, though we need to keep in mind that it’s 35% of a relatively small number, accounting for only 5% of total shots from the backhand corner. Less surprising is the much higher frequency of shots going cross-court. Not only is that a safer, higher-percentage play, it directs the ball to the opponent’s backhand (unless he’s a lefty), which is typically his weaker side.
Point probability
Shot selection is only a means to an end. More important than deploying textbook-perfect strategy is winning the point, and that’s where we’ll turn next.
The average ATPer has a 47.7% chance of winning the point when faced with a makeable ball in his backhand corner. Of course, any particular opportunity could be much better or worse than that. But again, without camera-based ball-tracking data, we can’t make more accurate estimates for specific chances. We can get some clues as to the range of probabilities by looking at how they vary at different stages of the rally. When a player has an opportunity for a “serve-plus-one” shot in the backhand corner–the third shot of the rally–his chances of winning the point are higher, at 51.1%. On the fourth shot of the rally, when pros are often still recovering from the disadvantage of returning, the chances of winning the point from that position are 45.4%. Context matters, in large part because context offers hints as to whether certain shots are better or worse than average.
So far, we have an idea of the probability of winning the point before making a choice. There are two ways of looking at the probability after choosing and hitting a shot: the odds of winning the point after hitting the shot, and the odds of winning the point after making the shot. The second number is obviously going to be better, because we simply filter out the errors. By excluding what could go wrong, it doesn’t give us the whole picture, but it does provide some useful information, showing which shots have the capacity to put opponents in the worst positions.
Here are the point probabilities for each of the shots we’re considering. For each choice, I’ve shown the probability of winning the point after hitting the shot (“Post-Shot”) and after making the shot (“In-Play”).
Forehands tend to do more to improve point-winning probability than backhands, though the down-the-middle forehand is less effective than a backhand to either corner. Again, this is context talking: A player who runs around a backhand just to hit a conservative forehand may have misjudged the angle or spin of the ball and felt forced to make a more defensive play. Still, it’s a relatively common tactic on slower clay courts (on clay, it is almost twice as common than tour average), and it may be used too often.
The most dramatic differences between the two probabilities are on the down-the-line shots. Both forehand and backhand are aggressive, high-risk shots, something reflected in the winner and unforced error rates for each. 9% of all shots from the backhand corner are winners, and another 11% are unforced errors. Of down-the-line shots, 23% are winners and 19% are unforced errors. While the choice to go down the line isn’t superior to other options, both the forehand and backhand are devastating shots when they work.
Player by player
Let’s tentatively measure “effectiveness” in terms of increasing point probability. Setting aside the complexity of context, which won’t be the same for every player, the most effective pro is the one who makes the most of a certain class of opportunities.
Here are the 10 best active players (of those with at least 20 charted matches) who do the most when faced with a makeable ball in their own backhand corner. Keep in mind that the average player has a 47.7% chance of winning the point from that position:
Player Post-Shot
Rafael Nadal 52.9%
Diego Schwartzman 52.4%
Novak Djokovic 52.3%
Nikoloz Basilashvili 51.9%
Andrey Rublev 51.8%
Kei Nishikori 51.5%
Gilles Simon 51.2%
Pablo Cuevas 50.9%
Alex De Minaur 50.0%
Pablo Carreno Busta 49.6%
The Match Charting Project data might understate just how effective Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, and Kei Nishikori are from their backhand corner, since a disproportionate number of their charted matches are against other top players. In any case, it is no surprise to see them here, along with such backhand warriors as Diego Schwartzman and Gilles Simon.
This list is limited to the tour regulars with at least 20 matches charted. One more name to watch out for is Thomas Fabbiano, with only 12 matches logged so far. In that limited sample, his point probability from the backhand corner is a whopping 59.2%. He isn’t quite that much of an outlier in reality, since his charted matches include contests against Ivo Karlovic, Reilly Opelka, and Sam Querrey, opponents whose ground games leave a bit to be desired. But his overall figure is so far off the charts that, even adjusting downward by a hefty margin, he appears to be one of the more dangerous players on tour from that position.
Forehands and backhands
Let’s wrap up by looking at something a bit more specific. For backhands and forehands (without separating by direction), which players are most effective after hitting that shot from the backhand corner? We’re continuing to define effectiveness as winning as many points as possible after hitting the shot. I’ll also show how often each of the players opts for their effective shot, giving us a glimpse at tactical decisions, not just tactical success.
Here are the best backhands from the backhand corner. It was supposed to be a top ten list, but I think you’ll understand why I struggled to cut it off before listing the top 16 players, roughly one-fifth of the 75 players with at least 20 charted matches:
Player Post-shot BH Freq
Diego Schwartzman 52.8% 74.0%
Rafael Nadal 52.7% 64.7%
Novak Djokovic 52.7% 76.1%
Kei Nishikori 51.7% 74.0%
Gilles Simon 51.4% 88.0%
Andrey Rublev 51.1% 67.1%
Pablo Carreno Busta 51.1% 75.3%
Nikoloz Basilashvili 51.0% 75.0%
Alexander Zverev 50.8% 75.1%
Alex de Minaur 50.6% 74.8%
Daniil Medvedev 50.6% 87.2%
Juan Martin del Potro 50.3% 49.1%
Pablo Cuevas 50.2% 60.6%
Andy Murray 50.1% 65.0%
Richard Gasquet 49.9% 75.8%
Stan Wawrinka 49.8% 63.4%
The “BH Freq” column–for backhand frequency–really demonstrates the range of tactics used by different players. Gilles Simon and Daniil Medvedev opt for the topspin backhand almost every time, rarely slicing or running around the shot. At the opposite extreme, Juan Martin del Potro hits a topspin backhand less the half the time from that position. Perhaps because of his selectiveness–dealing with awkward positions by slicing–he is effective when he makes that choice.
Now the best forehands from the backhand corner:
Player Post-shot FH Freq
Gilles Simon 63.1% 6.7%
Rafael Nadal 61.9% 16.6%
Benoit Paire 61.9% 1.5%
Kei Nishikori 61.2% 10.4%
Andrey Rublev 61.0% 20.1%
Casper Ruud 60.8% 27.1%
Marton Fucsovics 60.5% 16.3%
Novak Djokovic 60.0% 9.7%
Daniil Medvedev 59.8% 3.3%
Pablo Cuevas 58.9% 20.9%
Sam Querrey 58.2% 15.6%
Felix Auger Aliassime 57.7% 16.0%
This list is more of a mixed bag, in part because there are so many fewer forehands from the backhand corner. Benoit Paire’s numbers are based on a mere 21 shots. I wouldn’t take his effectiveness seriously at all, but it’s always entertaining to see evidence of his uniqueness. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Casper Ruud, who runs around his backhand more than anyone else in the charting dataset except for Jack Sock and Joao Sousa. (Neither one of which is particularly effective, though presumably they do better by avoiding their backhands than they would by hitting it.)
One name you might have expected to see on the last list is Roger Federer. He’s around the 80th percentile in the forehand category, winning 56.9% of points when hitting a forehand from the backhand corner. He’s good, but not off the charts in this category. Like Nadal and Djokovic, he might look better if these numbers were adjusted for opponent, because so many of his charted matches are against fellow elites.
Next
There’s clearly a lot more to do here, including looking at probabilities for direction-specific shots, isolating the effect of certain opponents, and trying to control for more of the factors that aren’t explicitly present in the data. Not to mention extending the same framework to other shots from other positions on court. Stay tuned.
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