tennis gut

Australian Open Men 2017 – Preview Novak Djokovic has won this title six times.  Andy Murray has been in the final five times without a win.  Federer and Nadal are both returning from injury.  Del Potro is out with injury, and Wawrinka is at his customary #4 in the world.  Djokovic slumped at the end of last year, allowing Murray to claim the yearend #1 spot.  But Novak beat Andy in the final of Doha last week.  Is Djokovic ‘back’ or is Murray still the ‘real’ #1?  Brad Gilbert says he would be shocked if one of these two doesn’t win, but which is the favourite?  The bookies have them at dead even odds. First Quarter Murray gets the #1 seed at a slam tournament for the first time in his career.  His first few rounds look pretty tame.  Seventeen-year-old Alex De Minaur won a round this week in Sydney and is nearby in the draw, but is of interest likely to only true geeks of the sport.  Sam Querrey (seeded #31) lurks as p...

Australian Open Women 2017 – Preview Sharapova is out on a drug suspension, Kvitova is recovering from a knife attack, Azarenka is off being a mother, Keys is out with an injury, a bunch of recent slam winners have retired (Pennetta, Li, Bartoli, Clijsters, even Ivanovic), in fact only one other former champion will play in Australia – is there any chance Serena Williams will NOT win this Australian Open? The best bets to deny Serena the title are probably last year’s defending champ Angelique Kerber, US Open runner up Karolina Pliskova, last year’s French Open champ Garbine Muguruza, world #3 Aggie Radwanska, #4 Simona Halep, Yearend Championship winner Dominika Cibulkova, or last year’s semi-finalist here #10 Johanna Konta. First Quarter The #1 seed is last year’s champ, Angelique Kerber.  She’s got a forgettable 1-2 (win-loss) record this year, but that might be all she needs as a warm up to defending her first major title.  Her first round opponent, Lesia...

I was surfing over at tennis-warehouse forums and got into a conversation about the peak age for male pros.  I poked around my spreadsheets and voila, came up with a few graphs. The first is based on computer rankings in the open era. The data set is all men who won a slam and were born in 1950 or later (so that most of their careers are captured in the rankings). What the graph shows is the average computer ranking of all men in the data set. The peak in this graph is around 23 to 25. The attack is quite sharp to age 20, but the taper to age 31 or so is fairly gradual. It certainly illustrates that prime age is from 20 to 29-30. (Incidentally, the small hiccup at age 24 is almost totally due to Pat Cash, and the one at 27 to Del Potro.) The second graph shows just the end of year rankings for the most recent 6 top men who were multi-year #1's, and had reasonably long careers (note that Sampras has the shortest career of this group). For Laver and Rosewall, rankings ...