sbengte
G.O.A.T.
ITF. Motivation : Keep the slam race alive by having things in place to help Nadal catch Federer.
Nadal's 2018 Wimbledon Draw
- Thread starter Ray Mercer
- Start date
ITF. Motivation : Keep the slam race alive by having things in place to help Nadal catch Federer.
MichaelNadal
Bionic Poster
Maybe Nadal is keeping it alive himself by being far more long lasting than we expected?
Spanish moonballer better slay
I have no trouble seing the motivation, people want to see Fedal.
Dont get me wrong, i have no reason to believe the draws are rigged. But if the W draw is "too good to be true" i will reconsider.
Subway Tennis
Legend
Who inside the ITF? To function as a conspiracy you couldn't have everyone in the organisation "down with the program" the cover would be blown instantly. So who would it be? And how is the ITF casting influence over the body in charge of actually making the draw, without the broader grand slam committee finding out?
sbengte
G.O.A.T.
Tired of debunking this myth, but will try again (quoting old posts):
sbengte said:
sbengte said:
sbengte
G.O.A.T.
Maybe Nadal is keeping it alive himself by being far more long lasting than we expected?
Spanish moonballer better slay
You know I love Raphla, don't you ?
MichaelNadal
Bionic Poster
You know I love Raphla, don't you ?
And I love spaghetti
so I switched to wings in your honor 
Eye Test
Rookie
Mom's spaghetti?And I love spaghetti
Yeah sure you have point.
But again, Nads projected path USO17 was
QF Dimitrov
SF Federer
F Cilic.
This Isn’t obvious to me as a rigged draw.
sbengte
G.O.A.T.
sbengte
G.O.A.T.
Dimitrov falling was unexpected/down to luck - agreed - although Dimitrov is not expected to beat Nadal in a slam. Cilic and Berd (and also Fed) who were in Nadal's draw were injured to begin with and weren't expected to hold their places in the rounds they were seeded to play. (Over the years, I have noticed that injured players regularly land in Nadal's draw)
Plus Delpo conveniently fell in Fed's quarter so they soften each other up before one of them faces Nadal (and USO is the only slam where Delpo has done anything of note and is a genuine threat )
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D
Deleted member 756486
Guest
Most insecure fanbase in all of sports? That would be LeBron fans..
Im(moral) Winner
G.O.A.T.
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Deleted member 756486
Guest
Haha good one.
I like Messi a lot but I’m more of a Henry and Bergkamp fan. I should probably hate him actually, he’s scored 9 goals against my beloved gunners.
MichaelNadal
Bionic Poster
Longstanding inside joke.... Sbengte=Spaghetti
To answer the Q more direcly though Grandma's spaghetti slays alllll.
D
Deleted member 756486
Guest
Football*Sheesh, all those polluting the forum with soccer talk, get out of here
Or futbol if you prefer but never soccer.
Eye Test
Rookie
They do have a lot to be insecure of lol, so thats pretty rational.
Some fedfans go completely crazy insecure for no real reaso and fed is widely regarded as the GOAT.
VaporDude95
Banned
It was sarcasm bro
WeakEraKing
Rookie
Gary Duane
G.O.A.T.
I didn't think they were looking for Nadal-Djokovic finals. If anything I would have figured they were hoping for Fed in the finals, then against either of the other top players. So either Nadal-Fed or Novak-Fed to me would have been the obvious hoped for result in terms of tickets and ratings. For instance, AO 2017 had to be what the tournament was hoping for, because so many people were looking for another Fedal final.
But why would events deliberately schedule Fed against Djokovic before finals? I can't figure that one out. Perhaps you have an idea...
mellowyellow
Legend
Dimitrov never made a QF @ USO in his life. Feds back was trash, and probably lost any edge he had leading in because of that injury the weeks before. Only a fool thought he was winning, or even making a final.
mellowyellow
Legend
It's the one major they have yet to meet. I think they realize time is running out for that to happen. A semi would have been at least feasible, taking into account Feds back situation.
Gary Duane
G.O.A.T.
It's really wild that they have not met at the USO. It does not seem possible. And they have not met at Wimbledon for 10 years. To me this highlights Nadal's lack of readiness for grass after RG, and that has more to do with timing than lack of ability on grass. He gives everything on clay each year, and it may be the same again this year.
I will be shocked if he makes it past the first four rounds.
mellowyellow
Legend
Well, conditions for grass were definitely changed and that favored him early on, or at least neutralized the field against him. Then athleticism and consistency could take over. 2012 bounce was reduced dramatically and I think it's no coincidence he hasn't performed the last 5 years solely based on that.
I think for Nadal the USO was always too late and conditions were too fast. Lately though Fed has not played great there and the conditions are more favorable for Nadals play. Consider the grass season has been short for Nadal the past few years as well.
VaporDude95
Banned
merlinpinpin
Hall of Fame
Well, the US Open have been caught red-handed with draw-rigging, and more than once, too. Now they don't even pretend, they just have the draw made behind closed doors, it's much more convenient.
For the record, I don't think there's been any draw rigging at RG. AO and Wimby, there are a few "oddities" that sure have me raise an eyebrow (Isner-Mahut, anyone?). But as for the USO, no question. As I said, they've done it time and time again, why would they stop now?
merlinpinpin
Hall of Fame
Because if you want to "protect" a Fedal final, that's the obvious route to go (Djokovic would beat Nadal most of the time and, up until fairly recently, Federer would beat Djokovic most of the time, so having Djokovic on the same side as Federer helps your hoped-for Fedal final; a Nadal-Djokovic SF woumd hinder it).
mandy01
G.O.A.T.
MichaelNadal
Bionic Poster
mandy01
G.O.A.T.
Healthy food although it also resembles a Maestronian's frame of mind before Wimbledon.Hmm that actally looks good
Sure. We are not discussing If the draw was weak, or If It opened up. Anderson should have never been In a final. But was it rigged?
With Muzz and Djoko out, Fed/Cilic injured and Dimitrov a Mug, what would have been a tough draw for Nadal? He was winning In that field anyway.
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MichaelNadal
Bionic Poster
Healthy food although it also resembles a Maestronian's frame of mind before Wimbledon.
Im still working on it.... 2 salads today
D
Deleted member 77403
Guest
Healthy food although it also resembles a Maestronian's frame of mind before Wimbledon.
Hey @mandy01 haven't seen you in a while.
Im just trying to be objective
. Im a Maestronian so i definetly dont wont easy draws for Rafa. Delpo and Fed being in the same quarter Isn’t enough to say the draw was rigged. If Dimi is a Mug, Cilic/Fed injured and Djoko and Muzz out, what would have been a tough draw?
sbengte
G.O.A.T.
Im just trying to be objective
Delpo and Fed being in the same quarter Isn’t enough to say the draw was rigged. If Dimi is a Mug, Cilic/Fed injured and Djoko and Muzz out, what would have been a tough draw?
Having a couple of big servers/big hitters in the QF or earlier ...like Querrey/Delpo/Anderson (Yes, Anderson in the final vs Anderson in an earlier round is a huge big difference). Or just having 2-3 top 10 or even top 15 FCS back to back in the draw.
Yeah, Delpo-Fed being in the same quarter alone isn't proof of draw rigging , but Nadal getting two prior cakewalks to the final (2010, 2013) at the USO is.
zagor
Bionic Poster
The thing is again, hindsight. Fed was considered a slight favourite against Nadal in 2012 AO, remember? 2014 the landscape changed quite a bit, Murray had a back surgery, Fed was having back issues the previous year and has just switched to a new frame etc. so hard to use it as an example. 2014 was a pretty chaotic and unpredictable year on the whole.
Fair point that Murray did have wins over Nadal at AO and USO (though he always went down easily to him at Wimbledon for some reason) so he might not have been considered a gimmie but if Fedal final was the desired outcome and Djokodal were top seeds it's not like there was any choice. Of course there was in the period before 2011/2012 but even then, despite Murray's victories over Nadal in a slam I think Novak was still seen as a bigger obstacle (in part because of the circumstances of Murray wins that you noted) and Fed was seen as a better bet against Novak on HC/grass than Nadal. I mean David Ferrer has two victories over Nadal in a HC slam too (like Murray at both AO and USO), doesn't mean he'd be seen as a bigger obstacle than Novak even before he scored his first slam win over Rafa.
I agree that the whole theory has holes (whether we presume draw rigging to favour Nadal or to set up a Fedal final) but just because we may not be able to understand the motivation doesn't mean there wasn't some draw tampering involved. At the end of the day the fact still remains that Fed and Novak have been drawn together a statistically improbable amount of times. I think it's natural that a number of people who are aware of the fact will have some suspicions about the draw regularity.
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zagor
Bionic Poster
Best I can come up with is they wanted Fedal slam finals and at the time Fed was seen as the far more likely one to beat Novak on HC/grass (remember, at one point Fed beat Novak 3 times in a row at USO).
I don't think there was draw rigging involved in 2017 AO, nobody could have predicted it unfolding the way it did. Fed back from the first long injury layoff in his career, Nadal's dismal slam results in two previous seasons, the Doha final where Murray and Novak still looked like the best players in the world, if someone predicted a Fedal final despite all of that then alll the credit to him/her.
mellowyellow
Legend
Isner Mahut 2? Come on it wreaks of fix.
idk, AusO 17 they could have fallen anywhere with their seeding .... Somehow end up on opposite ends of the draw. Just another instance too where fortunately for Nadal the draw mostly dried up. I would be willing to bet when strength for surface not just rank or seed, quality of play in the lead up to a major, pre tournament injuries, and attrition accumulated are all accounted for it would be fairly obvious many of the fortunate "random draw " outcomes we have seen. I mean Dimitrov was great pre USO17, but consider his history of crapping the pot soon after success and not having much success at USO it looks almost laughable to think he would semi.
zagor
Bionic Poster
Oh yeah, that was ridiculous. I hazily remember someone calculating the probability of it happening either here or on MTF and it was ridiculously low.
I think DImitrov was set to meet Nadal at USO QF, of course he has never gone that far at USO and as you said does have history of following up success with a stinker. Berdych wasn't an easy 4th round prospect but was injured at the time (retired against Delpo in Canada or Cincy can't remember). There was also Fognini potentially but he's never a certain bet to do anything on HC.
Regarding 2017 AO, you think Nadal would have gotten through Fed's draw to reach the final if their positions were reversed?
mellowyellow
Legend
No I don't. The 4th rd on was much tougher on his side with guys Nadal typically struggle against on that surface. Obviously it's always just conjecture, and it's easy to get lost in what is possible vs what is probable. I do think some of this admittedly pushes any rigging theories limits but some has been so obvious, and the repetitive trends you see, it can make you wonder what exactly is legit. I am also of the opinion that once things are phucked with, no outcome is technically correct.
metsman
G.O.A.T.
So we have a sample of size 25 with probability of success .5 in each trial, assuming draws are fair each trial is independent. You can approximate this as a normal with mean 12.5, variance 6.25. Thus the probability of observing a result as extreme as 20/25 is extremely low, less than .05 as it is 3 standard deviations from the mean. So in a traditional statistical test, this would raise some red flags. @zagor @125downthemiddle
Of course this is cherrypicking the most suspicious sample, but it's still worth noting that it would be extremely unlikely to see.
Of course this is cherrypicking the most suspicious sample, but it's still worth noting that it would be extremely unlikely to see.
tennisaddict
Bionic Poster
Hey, you didn't know the coin does not remember how it fell the last time ?
ADuck
Legend
If we're assuming the draws are rigged, wouldn't the most sensible speculation be that they were wanting to boost Federer's chances to reach the final? Federer fans keep propping up that it was a Fedal final they wanted and put anything else that could be anything else remotely anti-Federer in the blinders. But, I don't 100% buy that, a Fedovic final would have been almost just as successful, vastly more successful than a Djokodal final anyways. Draw organisers realised Nadal is a worse matchup for Fed anywhere except post-2011 AO and probably post-2012 Wimbledon. I venture you see a lot more Fedal semi-finals after those years.
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titoelcolombiano
Legend
Because they had the same draw as Nadal.
Surely, that is it.
Jeebus.
They were in the same section and didn't get through. Are we really going to pretend that guys like Tiafoe, Youzhny, Lopez, Kohlschreiber, Laaksonen and Menendez-Maceiras and that much better than Lajovic, Daniel, Mayer and Dolgopolov?
I will give Delpo this he did face Bautista Agut and Thiem but neither Fed nor Rafa were ever going to face guys like that so early as they were seeded 1 and 3.
All right smart guy, perhaps you can do the statistical analysis then? LUL
Agreed. Okay so let’s subtract slams from 2003-2007 during the mug era. Fraud now ends up with 8 slams. Nadal now 14 ....
Thats double standard. In that case, you should subtract Nadal’s slams after he turned 25 because his “up and coming” players are “mugs”. Fed had to deal with the remaining big 3 whereas Nadal had weak “up and comers”. You should also subtract a few French Opens. His clay court competition is no better than Fed’s hard/grass competition.
zverev2018
Semi-Pro
Was there a thread earlier today that said that Nadal had withdrawn from Wimbledon due to tendonitis (I'm not talking about the current "Nagal" thread)? Now when I go into my history and I click on that link, it's been deleted. I was at work and saw it, and I've been thinking all day that he actually withdrew... Now I see that he hasn't which is great news.
D
Deleted member 716271
Guest
@zagor
Thanks for this, I knew intuitively that the odds of 20 out of 25 happening was much less than just dividing and getting 20 percent lol
, but I didn't know how to calculate it. Pretty sure what you've calculated is the correct way more or less to do it.So .05 percent is what, like 1 in 2,000? Definitely eyebrow raising.
However, as you noted we are using a somewhat cherry picked sample. There was an article that is now behind a pay-wall called "Djokovic: Master of the Slow Escape" following his AO 12 win. In USO 10 SF, USO 11 SF, AO 12 SF, and AO 12 F, he had come back from improbable positions. If you picked the lowest odds of winning in the 5th set of each of those matches it would be 1 in several hundred to 1 in several thousand chance of a Djokovic win. Multiply the 4 together and you get something ridiculous.
Still, .05 percent does jump out at one if we think the draw makers really have incentive to fix it in precisely the way it played out.
Let's look at 09 and 10 though. Zagor is correct about hindsight, what matters is what the draw makers thought was a tougher opponent, not who ended up playing better. But Djokovic, despite winning AO 08 was already in the midst of a swoon by AO 09. Murray had made the USO 08 final. I remember in the AO 09 match, the ESPN commentators said Murray was the favorite heading into it or close to Federer. They were mocking it a bit, but Djokovic wasn't even in the convo. So, by AO 09, Djokovic was seen as being in his swoon that lasted really until USO 10 where he acquitted himself decently in the final with Nadal. This is a time where his struggles with Todd Martin were noted and publicized as well as his serve struggles. Murray had already beaten Nadal in a slam and 2 slams after AO 10, Djokovic had yet to. Djokovic's only real standout match in this whole 2 year stretch was a loss in Madrid SF 09. I would be surprised if Djokovic was considered a tougher opponent for either Nadal or Federer at this point. I'm pretty sure Murray would have been favored at most of these 8 slams. The only ones he may not have been are at RG, where it wouldn't matter anyway in oddsmakers eyes as neither of the 2 would be seen as having decent odds of beating Rafa at that time.
And guess what, ironically the only 1 of the 8 slams where Murray was drawn away from Nadal's half was RG 10. In 7 of the 8 we had Djokovic away from Nadal and Murray with him at a time when it would be hard to argue Djokovic was seen as a tougher opponent for Nadal. What gives?
metsman
G.O.A.T.
well the chances of 20/25 happening isn't <.05, the chances of that is some super small number that isn't relevant, the chance of any 1 outcome happening is super small. But the chances of observing a result as extreme as 20/25 or more extreme is .0015 or whatever it is, and since .05 is generally the threshold to reject the null this would be a little suspicious. Also the 25 match sample isn't as cherry picked as I thought, it's simply all instances in which I think Fed and Djokovic could be drawn into the same half as top players with one being the 1/2 seed and the other being a 3/4 seed.@zagor
Thanks for this, I knew intuitively that the odds of 20 out of 25 happening was much less than just dividing and getting 20 percent lol
So .05 percent is what, like 1 in 2,000? Definitely eyebrow raising.
However, as you noted we are using a somewhat cherry picked sample. There was an article that is now behind a pay-wall called "Djokovic: Master of the Slow Escape" following his AO 12 win. In USO 10 SF, USO 11 SF, AO 12 SF, and AO 12 F, he had come back from improbable positions. If you picked the lowest odds of winning in the 5th set of each of those matches it would be 1 in several hundred to 1 in several thousand chance of a Djokovic win. Multiply the 4 together and you get something ridiculous.
Still, .05 percent does jump out at one if we think the draw makers really have incentive to fix it in precisely the way it played out.
Let's look at 09 and 10 though. Zagor is correct about hindsight, what matters is what the draw makers thought was a tougher opponent, not who ended up playing better. But Djokovic, despite winning AO 08 was already in the midst of a swoon by AO 09. Murray had made the USO 08 final. I remember in the AO 09 match, the ESPN commentators said Murray was the favorite heading into it or close to Federer. They were mocking it a bit, but Djokovic wasn't even in the convo. So, by AO 09, Djokovic was seen as being in his swoon that lasted really until USO 10 where he acquitted himself decently in the final with Nadal. This is a time where his struggles with Todd Martin were noted and publicized as well as his serve struggles. Murray had already beaten Nadal in a slam and 2 slams after AO 10, Djokovic had yet to. Djokovic's only real standout match in this whole 2 year stretch was a loss in Madrid SF 09. I would be surprised if Djokovic was considered a tougher opponent for either Nadal or Federer at this point. I'm pretty sure Murray would have been favored at most of these 8 slams. The only ones he may not have been are at RG, where it wouldn't matter anyway in oddsmakers eyes as neither of the 2 would be seen as having decent odds of beating Rafa at that time.
And guess what, ironically the only 1 of the 8 slams where Murray was drawn away from Nadal's half was RG 10. In 7 of the 8 we had Djokovic away from Nadal and Murray with him at a time when it would be hard to argue Djokovic was seen as a tougher opponent for Nadal. What gives?
At slams I would think Djokovic was definitely considered tougher than Murray in at least 08 and 09. In 2010 it would be debatable. Also as said Fedal and Fedovic were the most popular matchups I think especially after the pretty entertaining 07 USO final and then Fed/Novak's parents' drama. In general in that time Fed was the biggest draw period, and Fedovic was definitely more popular than Fedray. Also, it's a bit weird that in 07 Djokovic was in Fed's half in 1 major, and then after Djokovic became a top player after 07, from 08-12 we had Fedovic over and over again.
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