{"id":3593,"date":"2019-07-04T10:32:52","date_gmt":"2019-07-04T10:32:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/?p=3593"},"modified":"2019-07-04T10:32:52","modified_gmt":"2019-07-04T10:32:52","slug":"let-bernie-keep-his-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2019\/07\/04\/let-bernie-keep-his-money\/","title":{"rendered":"Let Bernie Keep His Money"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.settesei.it\/2019\/07\/05\/lasciate-che-bernie-si-tenga-i-soldi\/\"><em>Italian translation at settesei.it<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On Tuesday, <a rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" href=\"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/cgi-bin\/player.cgi?p=BernardTomic\" target=\"_blank\">Bernard Tomic<\/a> lost his first-round match at Wimbledon to <a rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" href=\"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/cgi-bin\/player.cgi?p=JoWilfriedTsonga\" target=\"_blank\">Jo-Wilfried Tsonga<\/a>. No surprise there: My forecast gave Tsonga a 64% chance of advancing, and that didn&#8217;t even take into account Tomic&#8217;s shaky health, which has caused him to retire from matches twice in the last six weeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Tomic-Tsonga immediately made the news, and for the wrong reasons. The Australian lost, winning only seven games. Ignominiously, the match lasted only 58 minutes, the shortest at Wimbledon since <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/cgi-bin\/player.cgi?p=RogerFederer\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Roger Federer<\/a> needed only 54 minutes to thump <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/cgi-bin\/player.cgi?p=AlejandroFalla\">Alejandro Falla<\/a> back in 2004.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The All England Club responded this morning, announcing that Tomic would <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/sport\/tennis\/48868080\">lose his prize money<\/a>. Officially, he &#8220;did not perform to the required professional standard.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Fast and insufficiently furious<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I don&#8217;t know whether Tomic performed to the required professional standard, because there&#8217;s no exact definition of &#8220;professional standard.&#8221; I suspect it&#8217;s some combination of the following:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>The player lost badly<\/li><li> The player has a reputation for tanking <\/li><li> The match got a lot of attention so we have to be seen doing something about it<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What I <em>do<\/em> know is that Wimbledon officials are looking at the wrong number. Yes, 58 minutes is an extremely fast three-set match. But Tomic&#8211;even when he&#8217;s fully engaged and playing his best&#8211;is probably the quickest player on tour, often serving as soon as a ballkid gets him the ball. Tsonga also plays fast. Neither player is a good returner, and the Frenchman is a devastating server on a fast surface, so the points were always going to be short.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The more appropriate metric, then, is points played. Tomic and Tsonga contested 125, which is considerably less headline-grabbing than the time on the clock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Fines all around!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Suddenly, Tomic-Tsonga doesn&#8217;t stand out as much. Since 2000, there have been 77 other men&#8217;s grand slam matches that required 125 points or less. That&#8217;s almost exactly one per slam. The list includes two quarter-finals, three semi-finals, and the 2003 Australian Open title match, in which <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/cgi-bin\/player.cgi?p=AndreAgassi\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Andre Agassi<\/a> dispatched <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/cgi-bin\/player.cgi?p=RainerSchuettler\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Rainer Schuettler<\/a> in 76 minutes, needing only 123 points. If we expand our view to matches with fewer than 130 points, we&#8217;re looking at another 45 matches, including both of this year&#8217;s Australian Open semi-finals. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Simply put: It is not unusual for a men&#8217;s slam match to be decided with 125 points. Really good players sometimes lose that fast. It just doesn&#8217;t usually attract so much attention, because on average, 125 points takes an hour and 21 minutes to play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Of course, there are plenty of one-sided contests in the women&#8217;s draw, as well. 125 points is about 42 per set, so the &#8220;Tomic line&#8221; is at 83 or 84 points for a best-of-three match. Since 2003, there have been <em>235<\/em> women&#8217;s singles matches of 83 points or less, including five at this year&#8217;s French Open alone. (Ironically, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/cgi-bin\/wplayer.cgi?p=AnnaTatishvili\">Anna Tatishvili<\/a>\u2019s loss to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/cgi-bin\/player.cgi?p=MariaSakkari\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Maria Sakkari<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/sport\/2019\/jun\/03\/anna-tatishvili-fined-playing-below-standard-french-open\">which triggered its own unprecedented fine<\/a>, lasted 93 points and 28 minutes per set.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Reactionary<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">All of this isn&#8217;t to say that Tomic tried his hardest on Tuesday, or that he &#8220;deserves&#8221; \u00a345,000 in an ethical sense. If tournament referees made it a practice to review video of every first-round match and dock the prize money of the one player who competed most lackadaisically, then sure, the Australian is probably that guy at Wimbledon this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But that&#8217;s not how it works. The &#8220;professional standard&#8221; clause is almost never invoked. Had Tomic frittered away more time between points in order to push this match over the one-hour mark, or the offender had been a player with a less checkered past, we wouldn&#8217;t be talking about it now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If the All England Club were focused on the right metric&#8211;the amount of tennis played, not how long it took&#8211;Bernie&#8217;s speedy, casual style of play wouldn&#8217;t be in the headlines. After all, there&#8217;s another casual, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/cgi-bin\/player.cgi?p=NickKyrgios\">mercurial Australian<\/a> with a poor return game who deserves more of our attention today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Italian translation at settesei.it On Tuesday, Bernard Tomic lost his first-round match at Wimbledon to Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. No surprise there: My forecast gave Tsonga a 64% chance of advancing, and that didn&#8217;t even take into account Tomic&#8217;s shaky health, which has caused him to retire from matches twice in the last six weeks. Tomic-Tsonga immediately &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2019\/07\/04\/let-bernie-keep-his-money\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Let Bernie Keep His Money<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67,112,122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-match-length","category-the-rules","category-wimbledon"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3593\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}