Tennis is stupid

Grand Slam tennis is finally back! The US Open kicked off last week after the tour took a nearly 6-month break. So to celebrate, I thought I’d take a deep dive into why tennis is stupid.

It’s one of the few sports that doesn’t have a time limit attached to it. It just keeps going on until someone has won either 2 sets (in a best of 3-set match), or 3 sets (in a best of 5-set match). This scoring system means it is incredibly tricky to plan for each match, and make it very difficult to predict what’s going to happen.

The stats below are taken from an actual 5-set tennis match. Have a look at them. Based off these numbers, who do you think won the match?

PLAYER A		PLAYER B
10	ACES	25
9	DOUBLE FAULTS	6
136/219 (62%)	FIRST SERVE % IN	127/203 (63%)
101/136 (74%)	WIN % ON 1ST SERVE	100/127 (79%)
39/83 (47%)	WIN % ON 2ND SERVE	39/76 (51%)
24/38 (63%)	NET POINTS WON	51/65 (78%)
3/8 (38%)	BREAK POINTS WON	7/13 (54%)
64/203 (32%)	RECEIVING POINTS WON	79/219 (36%)
54	WINNERS	94
52	UNFORCED ERRORS	62
204	TOTAL POINTS WON	218

What if I told you that Player A was the winner of this match? These are the stats from the 2019 Wimbledon Final – Djokovic (Player A) beat Federer (Player B) in a 5hr, 5 set epic, ending 13-12 in the fifth set in the longest Wimbledon final ever. But that’s the thing with tennis, and indeed most sports, the stats aren’t the whole story. They’re not even half the story. Looking purely at the stats of this match, you likely wouldn’t be able to pick the winner. By the time the two greats were shaking hands, the only stat that mattered was that Novak won 3 sets to 2.

But what if we dig a little deeper at some of the other tactical aspects of each player? Performance analysts all over the world, in every single professional sport have the task of coding, analysing and assessing future opponents in an attempt to get the edge over them in their upcoming battles. The four Grand Slams and the ATP and WTA provide so much of this information through Hawk-Eye data collected during matches. And I can guarantee both Djokovic and Federer did this same research before the 2019 final (even though they already know each other’s games inside and out). Tactical trends, serving patterns, tendencies on important points, where they hit the most errors from or to, or even what each player might do when they’re up or down a break. All of these questions would have been asked and answers would have been searched for prior to their matchup.

But again, that’s the beauty of tennis. This information may not even matter once the two players get out onto centre court. My PhD research focused specifically on how players use this information when returning an opponent’s serve. I interviewed past and present tennis players about how they used this type of information when returning their opponent’s serve. Surprisingly, most players said that they would take this information into account early on in the match, but after a while, if their opponent’s serving patterns changed, they would adapt to that change – not the previous analysis of the opponent. There may have been a million reasons for this change. Perhaps their opponent’s strongest serve was going into their strongest return, so they had to serve differently; maybe the returner was getting on top in the match, so the server needed to change it up; maybe they were slightly injured so couldn’t hit a kick serve, and instead had to slice it. Many of these little tactical cat and mouse games are going on during a tennis match, not just during the serve, but in every rally of every point. And it’s these little battles that make it such an entertaining sport for viewers, a nightmare for analysts, and frustrating for players when they lose.

Like I said, tennis is stupid. But it takes the smart players to be able to beat this stupidity, and they’re usually the ones on the winners list.

Gee Vee