Tennis has more luck in it than anyone admits

Net cords, frame shots and half-inch deflections decide a startling share of points, and the sport pretends they average out.

A ball clips the tape, sits up, drops dead on the other side. Somebody wins the point. Nobody wins the point on merit.

The standard response is that these things even out over a match, and over a career, and there is a version of that which is statistically true. But it is not true in the way people mean it. Luck evens out in aggregate across thousands of points. It does not even out inside a tiebreak, and tennis has a scoring system deliberately designed to concentrate enormous consequence into very small numbers of points.

That is the part I find genuinely under-discussed. A best-of-three match might turn on four or five points. If one of those is a net cord, or a frame shot that loops in, or a ball that catches the line by a millimetre after deflecting off a shoe, then a meaningful fraction of that match's outcome was noise, and the winner will be interviewed afterwards about their mentality.

Deflections deserve their own mention because they are more common than people think. A ball catching the frame does not simply go wrong; it leaves at a strange angle with strange spin and low pace, which is exactly the profile that is awkward to attack. Every player has won a point off a mishit that produced an unreturnable shot, and every player has pretended it was intentional, which is fine and also a small lie the sport tells constantly.

None of this makes tennis unserious. Skill still dominates over a season, which is why rankings are stable and why the same names keep appearing in the second week.

What it should do is change how confidently we read single matches. A player who loses a tight three-setter has not been shown to be worse than the winner. They have been shown to be close enough that the outcome was decidable by a piece of tape a centimetre high.

The sport's own scoring hides this well, because a scoreline looks decisive and a set of near-random events does not.

If you want to be honest about a result, ask how many points separated the two players. Often it is one or two. Then ask what happened on those points, and be ready to find that the answer is a net cord in the eleventh game.