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Why The Women’s U.S. Open Won't Be As Surprising As You Think

This image is a derivative of View From the Top of the Arthur Ashe Stadium, by slgckgc (CC by 2.0)

First things first: Of course the 2020 U.S. Open women’s tournament is occurring under extraordinary circumstances. 

Of course a tournament played in a pandemic, without fans, is something we've never seen before.

Of course a tournament played after a few brief warm-up events, following roughly half a year of inactivity on tour, offers no true basis for comparison across decades of Open Era tennis history. 

There is no betting guide for how to handle this situation. 

There is no established template. There's no recent precedent or contextual parallel to draw from. 

This is all new, and if we are being honest, any claims about who will win (or lose) this tournament represent little more than speculation. 

There is no run of form over the past two months. 

There is no Wimbledon tournament by which to measure players, either in relationship to their motivation level at the U.S. Open, or to their performance in crunch-time moments. 

This is a blank slate. 

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Therefore, given all these uncertainties and unknowns, plus the very specific plot twist in which six of the WTA top 10 have opted out of this event, you might think this U.S. Open women’s tournament is going to be unusually crazy and volatile. 

The word to focus on there is “unusually.” 

Stop and ask yourself: Why would this Women’s U.S. Open tournament be “unusually” wild and unpredictable?

Remember this: In 2019, the 16 semifinal berths at the four women’s major tournaments – four berths at the four different majors – were spread out to 14 different women: Naomi Osaka, Petra Kvitova, Karolina Pliskova, Danielle Collins, Amanda Anisimova, Jo Konta, Marketa Vondrousova, Ashleigh Barty, Barbora Strycova, Simona Halep, Belinda Bencic, Bianca Andreescu, Serena Williams, and Elina Svitolina

Of those 14, only Serena and Svitolina made more than one semifinal. 

Ash Barty won Roland Garros, not Wimbledon. 

Simona Halep won Wimbledon, not Roland Garros.  

Bianca Andreescu won the U.S. Open in her first main-draw appearance. She won a major title – Canada’s first in tennis history – as a teenager.  

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The 2019 women’s tennis season at the majors was constantly unpredictable, spitting out the kinds of results a “random result generator” might deliver. 

The 2019 women’s major tournaments were already grab bags of complete chaos. 

You never would have tabbed Barty as the French Open champion before that tournament began. Same for Halep at Wimbledon. Some people did think Andreescu had a chance at the U.S. Open after she won Toronto weeks earlier, but her feat in New York last September still defied normal expectations. 

Then came the 2020 Australian Open. How many people had a Sofia Kenin-Garbine Muguruza final? 

You can see where this is going: Women’s tennis has already been volatile and lacking in linear predictability. This sport at the major tournaments over the past year and a half has already been hard to assess. Different players break through at different moments, with wealth and prosperity being widely shared- the exact opposite of an ATP Tour in which the Big Three continue to lord themselves over everyone else.  

The current state of women’s tennis, relative to major tournaments, is as follows: You know the surprises are coming. You know the unexpected semifinal or final runs are coming… but you don’t know which players are going to deliver those surprises.  

We can all make specific guesses about which player will win. To be clear, one can construct a perfectly reasonable thought process in support of a championship prediction. My prediction is that Karolina Pliskova, in a tournament without fans and a suffocating media presence, won’t feel as much pressure and is well-positioned to produce the consistent tennis needed to win her first major.

The big picture is not connected to any prediction about who will win. The bottom line about the 2020 U.S. Open women’s tournament is that any prediction should not be clung to with intensity, seriousness, or a profound sense of investment in the outcome.

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No one knows what's going to happen, especially after nearly half a year of inactivity from the whole tour- an entirely new scenario in modern tennis.

This isn’t an Australian Open-like situation in which the tour comes back after the two-month offseason; this is a hiatus nearly three times as long, and what’s more, is that midway through this period of six months, athletes weren’t entirely sure they would even play in this U.S. Open. Even one month ago, there was a lot of uncertainty. Thus, the psychological terrain of this event is even harder to map out.

Yet, as genuinely extraordinary as this U.S. Open will be – a true one-off, an aberration, a context unlike anything else we have ever seen – women’s tennis has not exactly provided major-tournament results you could see from a mile away.  

Sure, this tournament will be unpredictable… but that wouldn’t mark a deviation from recent years.

It would represent a continuation of what we have seen at women’s major tournaments. 

Yes, you should expect volatility in New York. That level of volatility shouldn’t come across as being comparatively greater than in 2019 – that is the nuance some people will miss when they size up the 2020 U.S. Open women’s tournament. 

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Matt Zemek

Matt has written professionally about US College Football since 2000, and has blogged about professional Tennis since 2014. He wants the Australian Open to play Thursday night Women's Semi-Finals, and Friday evening Men's Semi-Finals. Contribute to his Patreon for exclusive content here.

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