{"id":361,"date":"2011-06-06T17:07:52","date_gmt":"2011-06-06T17:07:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/heavytopspin.com\/?p=361"},"modified":"2011-06-06T17:07:52","modified_gmt":"2011-06-06T17:07:52","slug":"fun-with-french-open-rally-length","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2011\/06\/06\/fun-with-french-open-rally-length\/","title":{"rendered":"Fun With French Open Rally Length"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At the ATP level, the ability to hang around in long rallies seems to be a key to success, especially on clay. \u00a0Most of the top players are such good defenders that a one-dimensional serve\/forehand game just doesn&#8217;t cut it.<\/p>\n<p>One stat you&#8217;ll occasionally see on television broadcasts is the number of points that reach a certain length, along with how each player is performing on those points. \u00a0The cutoff I&#8217;ve seen most frequently is 8 shots, and that seems like a reasonable enough line to draw.<\/p>\n<p>Armed with point-by-point data from (most of) the men&#8217;s singles matches at the French Open, we can take a closer look. \u00a0The following table shows three numbers for each of the 16 players who reached the 4th round:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Average rally length&#8211;that&#8217;s the total number of shots per point for every point that the player contested.<\/li>\n<li>Percentage of points that reached eight or more shots.<\/li>\n<li>Percentage of eight-or-more-shot rallies that the player won.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<pre>PLAYER              Shots\/Pt     8+  8+Wins  \nJuan Ignacio Chela       5.3  25.7%   48.0%  \nGilles Simon             5.3  25.7%   59.8%  \nAndy Murray              5.1  22.8%   50.5%  \nViktor Troicki           4.7  19.2%   48.9%  \nRafael Nadal             4.6  18.3%   56.5%  \nRobin Soderling          4.6  19.5%   55.1%  \nDavid Ferrer             4.5  16.8%   70.7%  \nAlejandro Falla          4.5  19.7%   47.9%  \nGael Monfils             4.3  17.3%   44.8%  \nAlbert Montanes          4.3  15.2%   46.1%  \nFabio Fognini            4.3  15.5%   59.5%  \nNovak Djokovic           4.1  16.0%   63.6%  \nRichard Gasquet          4.0  13.9%   57.0%  \nRoger Federer            3.9  14.0%   49.7%  \nIvan Ljubicic            3.7  11.8%   49.4%  \nStanislas Wawrinka       3.6  11.1%   46.2%<\/pre>\n<p>Unsurprisingly, the first two stats correlate quite closely. \u00a0The more eight-shot rallies you play, the higher your per-point average will be. \u00a0What may be more of a surprise is that the <em>number<\/em>\u00a0of eight-shot rallies you play doesn&#8217;t appear to have much effect on your <em>success<\/em>\u00a0in eight-shot rallies. \u00a0Andy Murray may be an instructive example here: He&#8217;s good at keeping himself in long points, but not always so good at doing what he needs to do to win them.<\/p>\n<p>These numbers are far from authoritative&#8211;none of these stats comprise more than seven matches, and many comprise only four. \u00a0With so little data, a single opponent can skew the numbers. \u00a0For instance, Nadal was closer to the top of the rally-length leaderboard in the Australian Open, but a disproportionate number of his points came against John Isner, who is normally at the extreme other end. \u00a0Matches against Ljubicic and Federer also kept Nadal&#8217;s average down.<\/p>\n<p>The same warning should be made about Ferrer&#8217;s impressive 70.7% winning percentage on long points. \u00a0I don&#8217;t doubt that he&#8217;s usually quite good in such rallies, but his four matches included two against players who are the exact opposite: Jarkko Nieminen and Sergiy Stakhovsky.<\/p>\n<p>As more data of this sort becomes available, it will be interesting to see what trends emerge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At the ATP level, the ability to hang around in long rallies seems to be a key to success, especially on clay. \u00a0Most of the top players are such good defenders that a one-dimensional serve\/forehand game just doesn&#8217;t cut it. One stat you&#8217;ll occasionally see on television broadcasts is the number of points that reach &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2011\/06\/06\/fun-with-french-open-rally-length\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Fun With French Open Rally Length<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","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":[41,96],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-french-open","category-research"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361","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=361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}