Sophie Laurent

My tennis education happened in front of a television in France, two weeks every spring, completely absorbed by Roland-Garros and then chasing the rest of the tour across awkward time zones for the years that followed. What kept me coming back wasn't the rivalries everyone talks about — it was how a sport between just two players hides so many moving parts beneath the surface. When I sit down to analyse a match, the ranking is the last thing I look at, not the first. I want to know how a player's game translates to the surface in front of them, how many gruelling matches are already in their legs that week, how the head-to-head has actually played out, and whether a brutal draw has quietly drained someone before they even walk on court. Two players can share an identical ranking and essentially be competing in different sports. Six years of writing this has made me wary of short-priced favourites in best-of-three, where a single tight set can rewrite everything. Rather than pretend the game is more orderly than it is, I prefer to set out my reasoning plainly and let readers decide how much weight it deserves. — Sophie Laurent