Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Frances Tiafoe and Sumit Nagal make Buenos Aires an unusually international affair, Alex De Minaur needs 44 shots to put away John Millman, and Muguruza gets another round-of-16 draw worthy of a final.
Scroll down for a transcript.
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Music: Love is the Chase by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2021. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: Apoxode
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Rough transcript of today’s episode:
The first number is 11, the number of countries represented among the 16 players in the second round in Buenos Aires. South Americans Diego Schwartzman and Cristian Garin lead the field, with the usual smattering of Spaniards and other Europeans close behind them. But unusually, players from North America and Asia both showed up to play and won first round matches. Frances Tiafoe, one of the few U.S. men who doesn’t actively avoid the clay, breezed through his first-round match yesterday against Facundo Bagnis, an Argentine who reached last week’s semi-finals in Cordoba. An even bigger surprise was an Indian, Sumit Nagal, who won his first tour-level match on clay by knocking out Joao Sousa in only 70 minutes. Second-round action will likely whittle the field back down to the typical array of Spanish speakers, but for the moment, Buenos Aires has a field as cosmopolitan as the city itself.
Our second number is 44. In Rotterdam yesterday, Alex De Minaur and John Millman played a 44-stroke rally in an opening-round clash between Australians. It featured the usual array of Millman’s bruising backhands, De Minaur’s scampering and retrieval, and defensive shots that erased any small advantage the other player had attained. On the 43rd shot, Millman upped the ante, hitting a sharply angled forehand that took his countryman well off the court. De Minaur barely reached the ball, stretched out his racket, and flicked a down-the-line winner into the corner in defiance of the laws of physics. Millman dropped his racket in disbelief, and had fans been in the arena, the Aussies would’ve gotten a longer, much-deserved break while the applause died down. Millman somehow regrouped and held his serve, but his younger foe took back the momentum and won the final two games to secure the match, 6-1 6-4. The 23-year-old shotmaker goes on to play Kei Nishikori in Wednesday’s second round.
Today’s third and final number is 2009, the Tennis Abstract Elo rating of Garbine Muguruza. It’s good for an eighth-place tie with Serena Williams, ahead of the likes of Elina Svitolina, Karolina Pliskova, and Jennifer Brady, even though Muguruza trails them all in the official rankings. Due to some bad draw luck and pandemic-related adjustments to the WTA ranking algorithm, the Spaniard sits at number 16 on the WTA computer and is unseeded in this week’s star-studded Doha event. Few players looked better last month, though: She reached the final of the Yarra Valley Classic and earned a match point against Naomi Osaka in the fourth round of the Australian Open. As a dangerous floater Doha draw, her second-round foe today is Aryna Sabalenka, the third seed and—again, according to Elo—the strongest contender in the field. Both ladies have a right to wonder at the injustice of two of the three best players in Doha facing off in the round of 16.