Rummaging in my old data, I came across an article I wrote for a sports website almost an year ago. While it did not get published there, I thought it was quite a decent attempt.
Spoiler alert: Only people with atleast some interest in Tennis or Sports in general might like it as it tends to go into analysis mode. Comments are welcome as usual.
Men’s tennis is boring while women’s tennis is dynamic. While in men’s tennis, you usually expect the top five or six players to make it to the second week of the grand slams (and most of them do), in women’s tennis, the list remains fluid and has around a dozen members (and even then the finalists never cease to surprise us). The fact that today the upcoming female players come from exotic countries with tongue-twisting names (like Petrova, Ivanovich and Jankovic) makes the scene even more complicated. The men are definitely trying to catch up. Finally Roger Federer has competition and it is not necessarily a five letter name starting with N. But, the men still have a long way to go before they can even think of catching up with the women in this case.
However, jokes apart, it is true that women’s tennis is facing a chronic problem. While Nadal overtaking Federer in the ATP rankings makes headlines all over, very few people would even know who the number one ranked player in women’s tennis is at any given point of time. Are the women players more prone to getting injured? Lack of commitment? Or is the flaw in the WTA ranking system?
Women players are definitely injury-prone but then that is an ailment that troubles the men as well. Nadal has been battling with injury recently and is yet to come back to his former self. This peculiar problem cannot be blamed on a tendency of women getting injured more frequently.
Lack of commitment? While some might argue out this point especially keeping the fact in mind that Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin-Hardenne quit at a peak in their career, there is no dearth of women who have given their life and soul to the game and this can just not be accepted as a valid reason for the volatility in the rankings.
A flaw in the WTA ranking system? I would say yes. The WTA ranking system is 52-week, cumulative system in which the number of Tournament results that comprise a players’ ranking is capped at 17 Tournament results. Within those 17 tournaments, some of the results that have to be included are the grand slam performances and a few mandatory tournaments. When Dinara Safina became the top ranked player (without having won a single grand slam), while she claimed that she would have liked to reach this milestone in a different way the 2nd rank, Serena Williams (fresh from winning the Wimbledon) had no qualms in announcing her disapproval of the system.
However, this is not the first time that the top rank in women’s tennis is a player who doesn’t have a single grand slam title to her name. In August 2008, Jelena Jankovic had the crown without even being in a major final. In 2003, Clijsters also had the number one rank to her name without a Grand Slam victory to her name. The new rule for the averages to calculate the WTA ranking was brought about in 1997. The flaws were almost immediately visible when Martina Hingis edged past Steffi Graf despite the fact that Graf had three majors under her belt that year while Hingis had just one.
So, what is it about the WTA ranking that such surprising results keep popping up from time to time and no one can ever be sure about who really is on the top? This new One of the reasons is that the more you play, the more are your chances of a better ranking. This just induces greed and a desire to play more and more which is bound to induce more fatigue and more frequent injuries. Also, the cap of 16 Tournaments allows players to disregard bad performances (in the non-mandatory tournaments) and including only their good ones. This is probably the only ranking system in sports where bad performances can be ignored.
One of the aims of this new change in the WTA ranking systems was to reward consistency in the performances of the players. Ironically, that seems to have created inconsistency in the rankings as such.
Khyali Pulao 