🦄 Wimbledon Round 2 Update
The tournament takes shape
Round 2 is complete! Compared to Round 1, this was a sleepy, steady, predictable affair. But take a step back, and you had Jack Draper, the English favorite with huge expectations, falling. You had Jasmine Paolini, the fourth-seeded Italian, going out—which means now that no. 1 Aryna Sabalenka is the only top-5 seed remaining in the ladies tournament. Sleepy? I think not! Full recap below!
As a reminder, you can always view the live leaderboard at the link below.
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🏆 Betty has retaken the lead! She has a commanding 120 point field over the field—and only Draper is eliminated (more on that UK slot below). I count four, maybe five, players who could legit win this tournament still on her roster. Good stuff, Bet!
🦎 Ashley is in second, followed by Milos—the Greek tennis legend. In the battle of enemies, Berg has retaken the lead over Shaw.
💩 Remarkably, Wyatt had such a stinker of a week that he has taken the bottom spot from Ella. He has only two players remaining, but they’re good ones: Novak and Carlos. Ella, for her part, only has Novak, Raducanu (who faces Sabalenka today), and Andreeva. It will be a battle for last.
Some other observations from the action…
🇬🇧 Bye, bye Brits!: Along with Coco Gauff, Jack Draper was the most popular pick in the league—owned by 69% of teams. Nice. It wipes out nearly everybody’s UK Player slot, and only the five people who selected Emma Raducanu still have a player alive in that spot. The problem? Raducanu has Aryna Sabalenka later today.
🇮🇹 Sinner is your winner: The top-scoring player after two rounds? That would be Jannik Sinner, who has continued to roll on the grass. He’s hit the straight-sets bonus in every match so far, plus a bagel (that’s the term for when you win a set 6-0) bonus as well. It feels like an inevitability that we’ll get a Sinner-Djokovic semifinal next week. When asked about the possibility, Sinner said, “The way he moves, I feel like he’s much more confident than I am on grass. How he moves.. this is also the experience. He has more than I have. He mixes up the game a bit more…He’s definitely the main person I look up to, trying to do a couple of things like him.””
🐐 Speaking of Djokovic…: He looks as good as anybody in the tournament thus far, and Draper’s loss makes his path that much simpler. A win on Saturday would be the 100th of his career at Wimbledon. And win in the tournament would be 25th slam, the most ever by a man or a woman.
🇵🇱 What could have been: In the ladies draw, oddsmakers give Aryna Sabalenka the best shot of winning the tournament. But after her? It’s Iga Swiatek, who has “struggled” this year (for Iga, struggling still means making finals and semifinals). At 24, she’s a five-time Slam winner. Not a single team took Iga. She has a big potential showdown looming with Ryabakina. If she can survive that, the sky is the limit.
Some of the stories you missed in the action on the grass courts the past few days…
😍 Get yourself somebody who looks at you the way Trinity Rodman looks at Ben Shelton…
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🫨 Speaking of Shelton…ever wonder what it would look like to face his serve?
😳 Shot of the tournament?
🤦 I had missed this earlier. Alexander Bublik, who was a popular pick in our tournament, got a little confused about the score in his first round match this week, which he lost.
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-Joe & Andrew