Wolf - the 4th win against a British player was against Matt Smith in Nottingham ATP qualies in 2003, so that assumed qualies counted, obvously.

However, it turned out that I had mis-coded the US Open qualifying wins. I even remember thinking, "hold on, didn't he come through US Open qualifying once, so shouldn't it be at least 3?" ... but by then the ITF site had crashed and when I looked up his US Open activity on the ATP site, no qualifying results showed. That matches wolf's impression about qualies not counting but I was sure I'd seen qualifying results on ATP activity records for other players, so I assumed I must be mis-remembering Andy ever playing qualies there.

Hence, he had actually had 5 wins in ATP/slam qualies (the 2 I had included in my 400 along with 3 I had not), but that took my total to 403 with qualies but not DC or 412 with DC but not qualies.

With hindsight, it would clearly have been safer to work ATP activity listing but I had wanted to do it quickly and the ITF site (while slow to load results in the first place) gave me slightly easier to use data for the spreadsheet. Either set of results needed Futures and Challengers excluded before I could do anything and I had thought that as long as I could reconcile it to 400, it would be safe enough.

Going back to the ATP data and getting rid of Futures and Challengers did give me 400 (once I had realised they mark "W"s against byes!) and a slightly different split by countries as shown below:

FRA 55
ESP 51
USA 39
ARG 24
SUI 22
CRO 21
RUS 18
SRB 17
ITA 16
GER 12
CZE 11
UKR 9
AUT 7
BEL 6
SWE 6
AUS 5
CYP 5
FIN 5
LAT 5
CHI 4
COL 4
JPN 4
KAZ 4
NED 4
ROU 4
BLR 3
BUL 3
DEN 3
GBR 3
LUX 3
RSA 3
SVK 3
CAN 2
HUN 2
POL 2
POR 2
TPE 2
BRA 1
CHN 1
GRE 1
IND 1
ISR 1
KOR 1
LTU 1
PAR 1
THA 1
URU 1
UZB 1

I then compared the country totals and found differences for countries that we had not played against and that Andy had not played against in qualies. Part of that mystery was explained by ITF using the country at the time the match was played (e.g. USA for Bogomolov, RUS for Korolev) whereas ATP shows the country they play for now (RUS and KAZ respectively) but I was still left with 412 wins if I included DC but excluded qualies.

Then I remembered that the ITF data includes Hopman Cup, so cutting out Andy's 6 singles wins there brought the ITF figure down to 406. Eventually I found that I had inadvertently left in 2 sets of 3 Futures match wins from 2005 either side of Andy's first go at Barcelona ATP. So finally the figure was back down to 400!

Annoyingly, the 'headline' totals are now 48 countries instead of the 46 I quoted (HUN and POL from DC by the looks of it) and 163 different players instead of 165. Not miles out, but 2 is too far out for me!  Even more frustratingly, if my original ITF figure hadn't by a set of bizarre coincidences come to exactly 400, I wouldn't have stopped checking and I'd probably have found all the errors before I posted anything.


Ah well, so much for quick ...

Apologies if i've missed this, but what does Andy need to do to move back to no.2? Is it one more win?

paulisi wrote:

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Apologies if i've missed this, but what does Andy need to do to move back to no.2? Is it one more win?

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Yes, one more to be sure, though unless Fed wins the title, he has already done enough.

Hmm, I am rather doubting that Andy doesn't have the "tennis brain" for clay. Andy generally does have a good tennis brain, and I don't think the Rafa approach to clay court tennis is likely to overwork too many braincells !

I've always thought he could be much better than he generally is on the surface, but a relative lack of real belief that it is for him, partly due to not really being prepared to slide ( no doubt due to ankle concerns ), restricts him.

And Rog is the next big seed to bite the (devil) dust, beaten by 4-6 6-1 2-6 by the 14th seed, Kei Nishikori (WR 16), which means Andy's now the highest one still in it!  Let's  hope he doesn't follow Djoko & Rog out of the Madrid Salida.    Rog's early exit does rather prompt the question:  is he over the hill?

Andy 2 - 5 down in the first set