ATP and WTA: Are there too few top matches?
Top meetings in professional tennis are rarer than you think. Especially on the WTA Tour.
by Robin Huiber
last edit: Dec 01, 2022, 09:53 am
Rafael Nadal against Novak Djokovic - that's probably the duel between two still active players that inspires tennis fans the most. The two have met 59 times so far - but only once in the past season: in the quarter-finals of Roland Garros. The reasons for this are obvious: Djokovic's vaccination-related absences in Australia and at the tournaments in the USA, the injury breaks that Nadal had to take again and again.
But the fact is: outside of the respective final tournaments in Fort Worth and Turin, there were only 24 clashes between two players in the entire season on the WTA who were in the top ten at the respective time. At Grand Slam tournaments there were only three (after all: at the US Open, the two best WTA professionals of the year met Iga Swiatek and Ons Jabeur in the final).
No top ten duel in Vienna
There were more top games for men, at least 40 over the entire season, eleven in the Grand Slams. Here, too, the final of the last major stands out: after all, Casper Ruud and Carlos Alcaraz played their way to first place in the world rankings right there. As is well known, with the better end for the Spaniard.
Of course, the following applies: especially in smaller tournaments, the top aces can only meet in the final. Let's take the Erste Bank Open in Vienna, for example. With Daniil Medvedev, Stefanos Tsitsipas, Andrey Rublev and Taylor, four top ten players were represented in the tableau. In the "best" case, three duels between players from the top ten would have been possible: in the semifinals and in the final.
However, the record for this tournament is: zero. Because Rublev lost to Grigor Dimitrov just as early as Tsitsipas to Borna Coric or Fritz to Denis Shapovalov. The good news: the Wiener Stadthalle was still packed. Men's tennis lives quite well even without the really big duels.