Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Tsitsipas is the favorite to reach the Roland Garros final from the bottom half of the bracket, Aryna Sabalenka leads a long list of women with a good shot to win a first major title, and Carlos Taberner looks to ride a dominant qualifying performance into the main draw.
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 62%, the probability that Stefanos Tsitsipas or Alexander Zverev will reach the Roland Garros final, according to the Elo-based Tennis Abstract forecast for the tournament. Favorites Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal both landed in the top half, and while two-time runner-up Dominic Thiem is in the bottom, his recent form hardly guarantees another trip to the title match. The biggest winner is Tsitsipas, who is still seeking his first grand slam final and has been outstanding on clay this season. Overcoming the obstacles in his path is literally a tall order: He could face 20-year-old Sebastian Korda in the second round, John Isner in the third, Milos Raonic in the fourth, and one of the many players who could emerge from Daniil Medvedev’s section to face Tsitsipas in the quarters is Reilly Opelka. And then, if all goes according to the script as written by Elo, it’ll be a Zverev-Tsitsipas semifinal. The winner gets bragging rights, and—let’s be honest—a chance to maybe take a set from Nadal in the final.
Our second number is 41%, the chance that the French Open women’s draw will deliver a first-time grand slam champion. 2018 champion Simona Halep is out with injury, but that still leaves 14 former major titlists in the draw, including six women who have won at Roland Garros. Sportsbooks give the nod to defending champ Iga Swiatek, while my Elo-based model prefers 2019 winner Ashleigh Barty, crediting the Australian with a one-in-four chance of hoisting the trophy in two weeks’ time. The Tennis Abstract forecast identifies eight women still seeking a slam whose chance of ascending the peak in Paris is at least one-in-100, a threshold that 9 of the former major winners don’t meet. Foremost among the aspirants is Aryna Sabalenka, third favorite overall with a 10% chance of coming out on top, and not far down the list is 17-year-old Coco Gauff, a one-in-37 longshot. Thanks to Barty’s outstanding clay-court season, the field isn’t quite the free-for-all of some recent slams. But the talent pool is so deep that it’s almost even odds that yet another debutante will triumph.
Today’s third and final number is 6, the number of games lost by Carlos Taberner in three rounds of qualifying this week. Taberner, a 23-year-old Spaniard ranked 137th in the world, was playing his sixth career grand slam qualifying draw, and has advanced to the main event for only the second time. In 2018, he fought through two three-setters just to earn a first-round match against Stefanos Tsitsipas, in which he eked out one set. In the intervening three years, he’s only faced 10 top-100 opponents, losing more than half the time. This week, he’s been a completely different player. Taberner won 6-1, 6-2, 6-2, 6-0, 6-1, 6-0, averaging less than 70 minutes per match against opponents including grand slam veterans Martin Klizan and Thomas Fabbiano. Qualifying play isn’t complete, so while Taberner has earned his main draw spot, his next challenge has yet to be determined. Potential first-rounders include meetings with Aslan Karatsev, Matteo Berrettini, or Roger Federer, all of whom would be favored against a guy with a triple-digit ranking. Yet even a top-ten player would prefer that the qualifier placed next to him in the draw isn’t someone playing quite this well.
