JonH comes home wrote:

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GBJ wrote:

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Looks to me from the United cup site schedule that we'd not need to be not one of the top two runners up the best runner up from Perth goes through and stays in Perth for the quarters to play group A winner. No idea what the chances of that are

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 Ah, ok- best runner up from Perth of 3 and best from Sydney of the Sydney 3 then? Would actually make sense. 

id still reckon its a long shot with a Negative sets score but you never know! 

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Lots of matches still to be played, but if USA beats Australia, Poland beats Spain 3-0, Czech Republic beats Serbia 2-1, and China beats Serbia, GB would be the only runner-up with a 1-1 record and 3 match wins. So a small chance.

JonH comes home wrote:

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9vicman wrote:

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JonH comes home wrote:

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GBJ wrote:

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Looks to me from the United cup site schedule that we'd not need to be not one of the top two runners up the best runner up from Perth goes through and stays in Perth for the quarters to play group A winner. No idea what the chances of that are

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 Ah, ok- best runner up from Perth of 3 and best from Sydney of the Sydney 3 then? Would actually make sense. 

id still reckon its a long shot with a Negative sets score but you never know! 

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Lots of matches still to be played, but if USA beats Australia, Poland beats Spain 3-0, Czech Republic beats Serbia 2-1, and China beats Serbia, GB would be the only runner-up with a 1-1 record and 3 match wins. So a small chance.

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  Clutching and straws come to mind! 

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 And Serbia duly beat China.

9vicman wrote:

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MrTSymonds wrote:

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Katie is set to lose 79 points next week which will drop her back out of the top 50.

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It's a net loss of 10 points on her current ranking of 56. The live rankings aren't showing the points that are dropping off from the first week of 2023 - Pegula loses 320 points from the United Cup - so are pretty meaningless.

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To complicate matters further, the WTA have changed their rankings calculations for 2024 to include a player's best 18 (rather than 16) events. Boulter drops one place to 57, and currently stands at a live ranking of 56. She's protected her Canberra points.

Looks like in the Perth section, we will finish ahead of Spain in terms of second placed nations - they are 6-7 sets, we are 7-8, so a smidgen ahead of them in set percentage terms. So it depends what happens between Canada, Chile and Greece in the other Perth group. Only 1 match played in that group so far, though, the other two matches are tomorrow and Wednesday.

Seems we have a better chance than I thought.

Based on quick calculations, if AUS win the mixed in straight sets, they might be first and USA second.

Edit: they are.

-- Edited by 9vicman on Monday 1st of January 2024 02:38:31 PM

Can't help feeling that the tie between USA and AUS was played out with both teams knowing what result the other would settle for. The weakest team in the group AUS ended up winning the group by losing 3 out of 4 singles matches, and winning two doubles matches (the one today very easily with the USA knowing already that they'd be in a strong position to qualify as a second placed team). It seems quite unedifying, when one considers the hard-fought matches that the GB team participated in over the previous few days. Today's tie had a whiff of "a Nod and a Wink" about it. Fritz losing to De Minaur, when looking strong all week, then Tomljanovic handing the win to Pegula, when she was up in both sets, setting up the dodgy doubles for AUS to top the group.

-- Edited by foobarbaz on Monday 1st of January 2024 11:33:28 PM

9vicman wrote:

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foobarbaz wrote:

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Can't help feeling that the tie between USA and AUS was played out with both teams knowing what result the other would settle for. The weakest team in the group AUS ended up winning the group by losing 3 out of 4 singles matches, and winning two doubles matches (the one today very easily with the USA knowing already that they'd be in a strong position to qualify as a second placed team). It seems quite unedifying, when one considers the hard-fought matches that the GB team participated in over the previous few days. Today's tie had a whiff of "a Nod and a Wink" about it. Fritz losing to De Minaur, when looking strong all week, then Tomljanovic handing the win to Pegula, when she was up in both sets, setting up the dodgy doubles for AUS to top the group.

-- Edited by foobarbaz on Monday 1st of January 2024 11:33:28 PM

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 USA have been eliminated so I don't think there was any fix here.

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 Perhaps "Best laid plans" and all that? The end result is the two strongest teams in the group of three, have been eliminated from the competition. If the "powers that be" want buy-in from the players for this tournament, then they'll need to work out a better arrangement for comparing the relative results. Using sets and games won percentages as criteria defining which team progresses when both are irrelevant statistics in a tennis match, is a bit rubbish imho. A better arrangement might be to discount the doubles match results, using the doubles result only as the means to get a result for the tie. A toss of the coin for teams that can't be seperated on tie and singles matches won, would be better than the current arrangement, and would remove the thought that teams were colluding. A even better scheme might be to have more teams in a group, and that might enable more players to play instead of them being stuck on the sidelines just watching.