Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Garbine Muguruza and Aryna Sabalenka deliver a high-quality match, all the remaining seeds in the Rotterdam top half are gone, and Sumit Nagal goes where few Indians have gone before.
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 1.0, the ratio of winners to unforced errors recorded by both Garbine Muguruza and Aryna Sabalenka according to the official broadcast stats of yesterday’s monumental second-round clash in Doha. The 1.0 threshold of hitting as many or more winners than unforced errors is often cited as a goal, but in reality, women only hit that mark in about one-quarter of matches. Nine out of ten times, it’s enough to win. Match Charting Project stats for the battle painted an even brighter picture, counting 80 winners in the three setter, with positive ratios of 37 to 30 for Muguruza and 43 to 38 for Sabalenka. The 22-year-old Belarussian’s level dropped occasionally, including in the last several games of the match, but she played well enough to beat just about anyone else, and she can largely blame her early exit on a lousy draw and an in-form opponent.
Our second number is 75%. 75% is the probability that the winner in Rotterdam this week will come from the bottom half of the draw, per the Tennis Abstract tournament forecast entering Thursday’s play. A few days ago, the top half of the bracket looked like the good one, with a pre-tournament likelihood of 59.3% that it would produce the winner. On Wednesday, it was gutted, with all three remaining seeds losing. Most prominent was pre-tournament favorite Daniil Medvedev, who fell to Dusan Lajovic to lose consecutive matches for the first time since September, and who must now wait at least one more week to knock Rafael Nadal out of the number two spot in the rankings. Also upset were Roberto Bautista Agut and Alexander Zverev, who somehow allowed Alexander Bublik to break his serve four times. The best remaining hope is Borna Coric, whose 7% chance of winning pales next to bottom-half favorites Andrey Rublev and Stefanos Tsitsipas, who make up the majority of their section’s 75% chance, at 39% and 26%, respectively.
Today’s third and final number is 49, the number of years since an Indian player has reached a quarter-final on South American clay. 150th-ranked qualifier Sumit Nagal did just that last night in Buenos Aires, ousting 2nd seed Cristian Garin in just his third career tour-level event on dirt. The last time an Indian player made the final eight on South American clay was at the same event in 1972, 49 years ago, when Jasjit Singh won a five-setter in the second round against the Australian Barry Phillips-Moore. Despite losing in the quarter-finals, it was one of Singh’s career highlights, though it pales next to his Davis Cup debut in 1974, when he became the first Sikh to play for an Indian side. Back in the present, Nagal is aiming to become known for something other than having a name that looks like Nadal. While he’s not about to remind anyone of his near-namesake on clay, he knows how to handle himself on a slow surface, having won a challenger in Buenos Aires 18 months ago.