Sorry, boffins, but there's no such thing as an unforced error in tennis

Times

12 hours ago

Thursday afternoon and I am in a small booth above Centre Court with three university students contemplating why we screw up in life or, more to the point, why you might get knocked out of Wimbledon.
My three new friends are part of the IBM data analytics crew. There are 65 of them here, covering every match on every court. They deliver the stats that record why you lost: your double faults, your number of points won against first serves, the number of points won in rallies between five and eight shots. The lot.
And they're not any old rag-bag students trying to pay off the debt for all the cider they couldn't afford last term. You can only qualify if you've played county tennis standard, minimum. Then there's an interview process from October to Christmas and training sessions from January to May. Some decent players have done this job; Henry Patten, a reigning Wimbledon men's doubles champion, for starters.
Here above Centre Court we are watching Iga Swiatek's second-round match against Caty McNally, the American. Of the IBM trio, the middle man is calling the point: 'Serve down the middle, backhand return', etc. His team-mates either side of him are inputting the different sets of data. They take turns exchanging the roles because their concentration cannot drop.
At 5-5, first set, 15-30 on Swiatek's serve, we finally get to the nub of it. Swiatek and McNally are rallying hard, McNally is tenacious and Swiatek, trying and failing to break her resistance, starts pushing it, closer and closer to the lines. Finally, in the 18th shot of the rally, the ball sits up, Swiatek plants her feet and is able to go for broke; she unleashes a forehand angled across at McNally's left but she is inches into the tramlines.
The IBM crew calls it: forehand out. 'Unforced.'
But hang on boys, that wasn't unforced. At least that's where my mind is. Swiatek has only made that error because McNally has been grinding it out, making the Pole play when she is increasingly stretched physically and forcing her to load the risk in her shot selection. This was a forced error. McNally forced it.
Whether it is an unforced error, in other words, is utterly subjective. An ace is an ace, period. What forces errors is an entire essay subject.
By necessity, IBM requires parameters that are as specific as possible and has thus reduced forced/unforced to a number of physical factors: did the power or positioning, for instance, of the shot you received force your error? If not, your error may be unforced.
But tennis doesn't work like that. In the big Thursday evening upset, Jack Draper made far fewer 'unforced errors' (22) than Marin Cilic (34), which might suggest that Draper was playing the more accurate tennis. Yet Draper lost in four sets and the reason that Cilic made more unforced errors (I'll stop using the inverted commas here) was because his tactical approach was to load the risk, hit the lines, play for winners — and that worked. His 34 unforced errors look bad but they actually reflected the success of his bold approach.
Earlier in the day I watched Alex de Minaur beat Arthur Cazaux in a match where the final two sets slipped rapidly away from the Frenchman in a cascade of what were recorded as unforced errors. While the stats suggest that Cazaux blew it, De Minaur's post-match analysis suggested it was his tactics that were responsible.
The Australian No11 seed said his game plan was 'playing a little bit of a lockdown and making him have to try to go for a lot more than he's comfortable to do. The pressure went towards him where he started to feel like he had to go for more and more and more. That's why I think the third and fourth sets showed a lot of errors on his side.'
So are those Cazaux's unforced errors, or did De Minaur force them?
The guy who really lit up the unforced error count was, believe it or not, Novak Djokovic. That wasn't here at Wimbledon but at the 2016 Australian Open in a fourth-round match against Gilles Simon, where the stats show him as having made 100 unforced errors, which was considered to be a record.
Are we therefore to believe that Djokovic suddenly became a record-breakingly crap player that day? Or was it that Simon's game was based so solidly on durability and counter-punching that he was known as 'The Grinder'? Accounts of that match suggest it wasn't just that Djokovic had a bad day, but that Simon forced it out of him.
Same thing at the French Open final last month. Aryna Sabalenka made 70 unforced errors and afterwards bemoaned her 'terrible' tennis, ignoring the fact that Coco Gauff might just have had a hand in it. Gauff's resistance forced Sabalenka to shoot increasingly for the lines and the more she missed, the more the pressure mounted and the further the game got away from her.
The stats suggest that Sabalenka was responsible for her own downfall, but actually Gauff was the architect of it. When the unforced error count was put under the microscope by The Athletic, it was described as 'a match to test the limits of tennis' most unsatisfactory statistic'.
In tennis, you could ask: is there ever an error that is completely unforced? In the Wimbledon rankings, the player with the worst unforced error count is George Loffhagen, a 24-year-old Londoner. The numbers say that 31 per cent of the points he played were lost because of unforced errors.
That feels pretty harsh; at least it does to his coach, Ryan Jones, who describes him as 'a Ferrari who can break down' when the circumstances become 'overwhelming'. For a player ranked No293, Wimbledon can be exactly that. So Jones and Loffhagen understand exactly what forced all those errors out of him.
Of course, this isn't just a tennis thing. You could say that Rory McIlroy's missed putts in the US Open were unforced errors but you would be completely ignoring the psychology of the moment that forced him to miss. Likewise with England's footballers missing penalties.
The most famous unforced error in rugby (arguably) was Gavin Hastings in the 1991 World Cup missing a penalty from in front of the posts that might have put Scotland in the final. The error, he would explain later, was in taking the kick at all. He had just been smashed in a tackle; he was in no fit state to attempt the kick.
That is sport: a lifelong story of cause and effect. The question is not whether the IBM lads were correct to call Swiatek's forehand an unforced error, but whether they should be trying to differentiate between forced and unforced error types at all. Life isn't like that.
I left home without my house keys yesterday and I guess IBM would have recorded this as an unforced error. Now, I know I could do better — that I was in a rush; that I'd tried to squeeze too much into the previous five minutes and that my personal admin is still not where it could be. But this was all completely self-imposed and definitely not an unforced error.