Last week, Tsvetana Pironkova dealt Aryna Sabalenka a rough start to her Miami campaign: a 6-0 first set. It took two more hours and a third-set tiebreak to settle the issue, but ultimately Sabalenka came back, shrugging off the abysmal opening frame.
It’s not the first time Sabalenka has completed such a comeback. In 2018, she overcame a bagel opener at the hands of Marketa Vondrousova at ‘s-Hertogenbosch, and famously, she recovered after losing the first 10 games in Ostrava last fall to Sara Sorribes Tormo. She didn’t just claw her way back against the Spaniard, she won the next 12 in a row–not to mention her next 13 matches after that.
Remarkably, these three matches are the only times Sabalenka has lost a first-set bagel at tour level. She’s won them all.
Context, please
Three-set comebacks are common in women’s tennis, but as you might guess, they are less common when the first set is a lopsided one. A 6-0 or 6-1 opener suggests either that the players are mismatched, or one of the competitors is having a particularly good or bad day.
Approximately one-third of matches go to a third set, and about one in six end up in favor of the woman who lost the first one. But when the opening frame is a bagel, those numbers are roughly halved–more than four in five of the matches are put away in straights, and fewer than 8% of the 0-6 losers complete the comeback.
Here are the numbers for every opening set score, drawing on all WTA tour-level matches since 2000:
Score p(3 Sets) p(Win)
0-6 18.6% 7.5%
1-6 24.3% 10.9%
2-6 29.3% 14.4%
3-6 33.2% 17.4%
4-6 37.1% 21.0%
5-7 36.0% 20.1%
6-7 39.7% 22.7%
Total 32.0% 16.8%
All else equal, losers of close first sets have a much better chance at coming back than those who drop lopsided openers.
About those 7.5%
All else is never equal, so it isn’t right to say that Sabalenka had a one-in-thirteen chance of coming back against Sorribes Tormo or Pironkova. A top player who loses an opening set is much more likely to bounce back than, say, Renata Zarazua, the qualifier who lost 6-0 6-0 to Angelique Kerber the same day as Aryna’s latest exploit. Zarazua isn’t that bad, but the odds she’d win the last two sets were much worse than Sabalenka’s.
Yet in the 2000s, no one has done what the Belarussian has, winning all of the matches in which she loses a love-six opening set. She’s three-for-three, and no one else is even two-for-two at tour level.
Sabalenka has a ways to go to catch Klara Koukalova, who came back from a first-set bagel six times, more than anyone else on tour this century. It took her 24 tries, which still works out to an impressive conversion rate of 25%. By contrast, Sorana Cirstea has been first-set-bageled 19 times, and has yet to turn any of them around.
There are more meaningful aspects of Sabalenka’s powerful and entertaining game, but at the moment, her perfect record after love-six openers is my favorite.
