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