Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Djokovic holds an encouraging record against the rest of the quarter-final field, Ashleigh Barty has gotten here without many top-ten wins, and a Swedish doubles specialist excels in his first grand slam.
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 94%, Novak Djokovic’s career winning percentage against the men remaining in the Wimbledon draw, if we exclude Roger Federer. Djokovic sports a 27-23 record against Fed, and you probably already knew that. Novak’s history against the other six men in the draw rarely shows up in broadcast graphics. He’s won both previous meetings against today’s quarter-final opponent, Marton Fucsovics, though he did drop a set at the 2018 US Open. All told, he’s 16-1 against the remaining non-Federer field, with a single loss to Karen Khachanov in the 2018 Paris Masters final. Since then, Djokovic has beaten the Russian three times running without the loss of a set. He’s 2-0 against Matteo Berrettini and Hubert Hurkacz, 6-0 against Denis Shapovalov, and has yet to face Felix Auger Aliassime. Past performance is no guarantee of future results, but in this case, head-to-head results seem like an awfully good predictor of the rest of the week for Novak Djokovic.
Our second number is 1, Ashleigh Barty’s career win total against top-ten players at grand slams. At the 2019 Roland Garros, the site of her one major title, the highest-ranked opponent she faced was #14 Madison Keys in the quarter-finals. At Wimbledon this year, she’s played no one ranked higher than Barbora Krejcikova’s #17, and she drew 75th-ranked Ajla Tomljanovic in the quarters. In 75 matches over the course of a decade, Barty has faced only six top-ten players at slams, with a single victory over Petra Kvitova at last year’s Australian Open. The world number one’s path through the second tier of the rankings won’t change tomorrow, as she faces #28 Angelique Kerber in the semi-finals. But rather than reflecting a run of good luck, the Kerber matchup reflects the increasing meaninglessness of rankings, with dozens of players in the field able to make deep runs at the biggest events. The German is at her best on grass, and she might be the most dangerous opponent for Barty out of the 128-woman field, regardless of her ranking.
Today’s third and final number is $121,777, the career prize money earned by Swedish doubles specialist Andre Goransson. If this is the first you’re hearing of Goransson, I don’t blame you. The 27-year-old has never held a top-700 ranking in singles, and he only cracked the doubles top 100 in February of last year. He’s partnering fellow Scandinavian Casper Ruud at Wimbledon this week in his first grand slam appearance. The Nordic duo have reached the quarter-finals in their second outing together, slipping past the Spanish pair of Feliciano Lopez and Marc Lopez in the first round with an 11-9 final set. The doubles prize purse at Wimbledon is a pittance compared to singles, but it blows away the checks Goransson is accustomed to at Challenger level. Goransson is set to earn 30,000 pounds, or about $41,000, if he and Ruud lose today. Even in that worst-case scenario, his Wimbledon earnings will represent a quarter of the money he’s made in ten years on the circuit. But why stop there? Two more wins and he’ll exceed his career haul in one go. On the ATP doubles tour, overnight successes are often a decade in the making.
