I see a couple threads on the BBC board suggesting that Nadal should actually be ranked number one, because of his dominant h2h record against Federer. I see these as basically just wind-up threads, but are any of you troubled by the rankings? Should there be some sort of bonus points for knocking off the top ranked players?

I know they had a system of "quality points" on the WTA ranking system, but I think that's been done away with.

Of course, even if the ATP used a similar quality point system, I doubt it would be anywhere near enough to make up for the fact that Fed owns three out of the last four GS titles, runner up in the fourth and has been no worse than runner-up in any event he's entered in the past year. :blink:

well done Nick

I completely agree with you Nick.

In addition, I do think there's something to be said for the argument that the head to head is so much in Nadal's favour due to the fact that Federer is second best on clay, whereas Nadal is a little bit off that on the other surfaces, so as always seded 1 and 2 they are only really likely to meet on clay.

Moreover, tennis is a game about individual match-ups, and it just so happens that the current number two's strength plays right into the number one's relative weakness. But the rankings are not based on how one particular player's game matches up to another's, rather on overall consistency and how that player's game matches up to *many* others. That's where Federer excells and Nadal comes up a little short.

Overall, though, I think the current Fed-Nadal head to head and their respective rankings is good for men's tennis - it makes it all the more exciting in an era where we've had one player dominating for so long.

oops excels with one 'l'

Hmm.. whilst head to heads are interesting, I still think that Fed is deservedly number 1 by some distance..

The ironic thing is that if Rafa does start to make ground on Fed in the other tournaments, then the more of a chance there will be of Fed beating Rafa on other surfaces, and making up some ground on the head to head!!

And so far, I don't think that they have ever met in another Grand Slam, which I think would be very interesting.

I have an example of a 2 players where one player was ranked higher than another but was often beaten by a lower rank player. This is going back a bit, but Miroslav Mecir was a top 5 player at the same time that Mats Wilander was top dog. I think that Wilander always had real trouble beating him, and was once quoted that such was Mecir's deception with shots that he never knew where he was going to play the ball!! I think that Mecir had a 7-4 head to head up on Wilander or something..

Wilander however is widely considered as the better player, in spite of this statistic, and of Mecir actually achieving quite a lot, including gold medal at the Olympics (beating amongst others Stefan Edberg en route to winning..)

Sound familiar? ;)


I wonder if anyone else knows of any similar examples, in the men or the women's game??

The thing is, Nadal will probably finish with a winning head to head with Federer, because they will be in seperate halves of draw and while Fed will get to Finals on virtually anything, Nadal is only really a cert on Clay, where he is favourite to beat Roger.
On hard courts they will only meet now and again, as players such as Blake can shock Nadal, while I doubt they will ever meet on a grass court as Nadal is a long way behind on that.

If they met and equal amount of times on clay, hard and grass (say five each), their head to head would probably be something like this:

Clay: Nadal 4 Fed 1
Hard: Fed 4 Nadal 1
Grass: Fed 5 Nadal 0