Daniil Medvedev is into the quarter-finals in Shanghai, 8th in the Race with 3220 points. Flavio Cobolli is 5th with 3540. That’s a gap of 320 points. I got my stats binder out on the bench, between two sips, and did the sum I do every year in November: if I win the next match, and the one after, I move up.
He’s the same, only bigger. A semi-final, 200 points. A final, 250 more. Frances Tiafoe has 3380, Arthur Fils 3325. Five places are still up for grabs in Turin, and Sinner’s withdrawal made 9th place a qualifying spot. Behind, Novak Djokovic, 10th, 380 points back. I know that pattern by heart: look ahead, watch behind, and never look at your own box.
What got me was his press conference. He said: “If I had played well in Canada, reaching the quarter-finals, or if I hadn’t lost 200 points last week, I would probably already be qualified.” There you go. That’s a clubhouse bar sentence. Me, I say: if my strings had held in October, and if the floodlight on court 4 hadn’t flickered during the tie-break, I’d have been C15.5 (a club-level ranking) for ages. Two practice sessions away, mind you.
And he added: “Only performances count.” There, I disagree. Performances count, but intentions do too. A well-built ball that goes out by ten centimetres is a performance in another context.
On the Maldives, he said even that would suit him if he wasn’t in Turin. When I miss promotion, I have the Sunday cone of chips. Not bad either.
In Couvin, we counted the raffle points, and that was enough. The cone, at least, never relegated you.
It’s true, we checked: Tennis Actu.
