You bitching and moaning isn’t data 🤷🏽‍♂️

 

For that awesome smackdown, expect a laid back but still prickly response from the OP — likely involving some country / nationality tropes and a comparison with the poster Silent_Bird thrown in.

 

Never mind the quality, feel the depth.

 

The best proof of this generation being the worst and how bad 2010s were is the fact Pushniacki was year end world number 1 two times in a row.

 

hmmm

i like this idea. not a bad start. keep it up! maybe you can do more than just slams like total % of points they earned per year, or if that's too hard, tier I and similar titles, # of players in top 10... etc.

also interesting years for cut offs, i wonder if this might change if it's say the 80-90, 90-00, 00-10 etc. generations

 

maybe even not defining by generation, since generation cut-offs can be quite arbitrary... a slam count (and other stats) by birth year line graph might be more informative

 

Meh, you can look at it 2 ways. Having 4-5 players dominating at the top doesn’t necessarily mean their generation as a whole was stronger than a generation that had 10-15 players at the top. Back in the 80s, 90s or even 00s how would you rate the chances of a #16 seed in a slam winning the tournament? Pretty slim. But today everyone is in the mix. Even the qualifiers 😯

 

Did you read my post? Even if you add ALL the slams won by ALL the players born between 85-95 it is still ridiculously low. You can argue about depth if there were multiple players from that group winning a few slams, resulting in a decent slam count. But they had a grand total of 21, it's less than 1/3 of the 75-85 girls.

 

There is no way to define it because when Wozniacki wins the other 127 dont
When Raducanu wins, the other 127 dont
How you rate them is subjective
I rate the Sharapova from Wimbledon 2004 thru AO 2008 very strongly
She won 3 majors by age 20 was improving steadily, then had shoulder surgery
As I posted in the Azarenka/Kerber thread, Vikas numbers dont tell how good she was for a few years

 

Where is Evert? 🤔

 

She was born in 1954

 

You have isolated a point that is perhaps interesting, but wrapped around a weird conclusion based on an arbitrary starting and stopping period. I assume you are using this 1995 cutoff to exclude Barty, but you could just as easily do it 83-93 or something and it would make as much sense. To identify a 10-year age cohort with fewer slams is kinda interesting, but since there are the same number of slams every year regardless of who is playing it doesn't tell you about quality it leads back to explaining who was winning them. So a lot of the same discussions as usual on here - why did Serena win slams later in her career than others, is there more depth in this cohort or just less dominance, is there a high quality new gen or just a power vacuum?

 

If women's tennis is so bad and terrible why do you people come here and complain everyday? It's like you do all this extensive research to justify your illogical rants about how much a generation sucks. Why not focus your time on doing something productive?

 

Just go back to watch some Margaret Court stuff, we all know who you are. Seriously if I were you - who believe this sport is so boring with mediocre players everywhere in one or two decades, I would find something else to do or at least other sports to watch, instead of whining here every year.

It's actually the opposite, most people seem to think the current generation sucks, while I am saying the previous generation was the real bad one, and this new one, offers a glimpse of hope. I'm with a positive and optimistic view with the current state of women's tennis.

 

I mean, of course.

Not a single elite player at the level of Hingis or above came out since the mid 00s. Tragic.
Hopefully Barty will be the first. You can argue Osaka, but she needs to win 1 or 2 more slams.

 

I think the generation between 1957-68 were quite weak because none of them won more than 4 slams. Tracy Austin won 2 and was injured and then Hana Mandlikova was the only other one and she got to four, but most of the slams in the 80s up to the age of Steffi were won by just two players - Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert. Many of the top 10 stalwarts failed to make more than one slam final, some didn't make any at all.

One stat from the 2010s which is quite shocking is that it was the only decade since the 1910s that at least two different players did not win 5 slams. The fact is that no one currently playing besides the soon to retire Williams sisters has won more than 4, so that means that no one besides them qualifies to be a bottom level 'great of tennis'. The 2020s have started in a similar vein with a number of different slam winners. We will see this week whether Ash Barty can join Naomi Osaka on two slams from this decade.

List of Grand Slam women's singles champions - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

I have always felt that the quantity of quality players has increased year over year beginning with the time of Chrissy Martina, when I started seriously watching tennis....with the overall quality going up every year. (Certainly the same of the men's side beginning with Conors, Bjorg, McEnroe). I don't get wrapped up in which "generation" was stronger, weaker in comparison, other than to say the level of competition is much higher now. As a fan I simply enjoy the product on the court. If you guys wish to debate the nuances of this by the numbers or whatever....sure, be my guest.....too much detail for my taste.

 

Rather than debating, I'm curious: why do you think that generation was weaker? Lack of talent? Lack of mental fortitude? Outside factors?

 

No one besides Serena seems to have tried to become a serious no 1 leading from the front, winning most of her tournaments since..Justine Henin in 2007. I feel that for most of the last 10 years, top players have sat behind Serena mentally and as soon as they got the world no 1 ranking, they seemed to feel the pressure and wilt. Ash is quite a good no 1 compared to the slamless ones of recent years, but she has only one won more slam in her reign since the first one and half of it was spent on the sidelines during her pandemic break. Naomi was won 4 slams but has never managed the sustained effort and her pathetic attitude to clay and grass is just unbelievable compared to any of the other great champions of the open era.

 

I'm not convinced that a single player dominating the field is a meaningful sign of a generational quality. It would be very easy to argue the opposite.

 

Well, I mean you could look at the level of tennis objectively. Like leave the numbers for an instance, and judge based on tennis talent and athleticism.

Are Wozniacki, Dementieva, Safina, Azarenka, Kerber,Radwanska..etc really at the same level of Kim, Justine, Lindsay, Monica, maybe even Capriati?

The number of GS won tends to map pretty well with the quality of tennis.

Many people would argue that Sabatini and Novotna are actually more talented and have more skill than the afromentioned dozen, but they actually have even less slams.

It is a complete anomaly that not a single player made her presence felt on the ATG list since the mid 00s.

 

Just go back to watch some Margaret Court stuff, we all know who you are. Seriously if I were you - who believe this sport is so boring with mediocre players everywhere in one or two decades, I would find something else to do or at least other sports to watch, instead of whining here every year.

 

True but Serena let others of her generation win slams while she went MIA and then she swept up the slams of the next generation. So that inflates the numbers of her own generation (and previous generation) that got to win the slams in her stead and then her own numbers add to that.

They're not as good. But knowing Serena is there on Tour isn't exactly the best motivator. One example:

Kvitova after 2011 Wimbledon won the YEC and then was SF-SF at the first 2 slams. And then QF loss to Serena. Imagine Serena wasn't there, Kvitova would already have 2nd Wimbledon that she defended and be super motivated for more. Instead she slumped after that.

Or Azarenka would win if she defeated Kvitova in the semis (although she wouldn't). And she could then even have the chance of 3 slams in 1 year as she would most likely win the USO without Serena. More young champions lusting for more titles would have been created IMO.

 

I'm afraid I'm going to give a Serena excuse anyway. Having watched her play in the matured form so many times, I have no doubt she'd trash off the court all the previous all-time greats.

Sharapova, Azarenka, Kerber were all excellent players that could produce insane level of tennis and even the former fame Hingis had nothing to look for in singles, once the new type of players showed up. Each of those 3 would have had many more slams without Serena, and it would feel both consistent and completely justified.

 

I look at it this way; Azarenka, Wozniacki, Radwanska etc have all performed worse in recent times than they did decade ago. Woz won a slam but that was just a one off.
Have they all suddenly lost form around the same time? Nah the field just stepped up and got better.

 

What a random cut-off. For starters, Evert gets left out of the Navratilova generation because she made the mistake of being born eleven days before 1955 started. Then, following that cut off, the Nav generation has Martina, Mandlikova, Ruzici (mere days younger than Evert, but another "generation"), Jausovec, Barker and... a bunch of slamless players (I am not including Jordan or O'Neil for obvious reasons). The Graf generation has Steffi, Seles, Sánchez-Vicario and some one Slam wonders (Sabatini, Novotna, Martínez). But then the Serena generation is overflowing with talent! Her, Venus, Henin, Hingis, Clijsters, Davenport, Capriati (whose career actually blossomed at the same time as Monica's and who retired very shortly after Seles did, but nevermind), Mauresmo, Li and even one Slam wonders like Stosur, Schiavone, Myskina, Majoli, Bartoli and Pennetta (am I forgetting somebody? It's just off the top of my head) (it feels so weird to lump Majoli and Pennetta together when their lone Slam win was over 18 years apart: one was one day before Ostapenko was born and the other was less than two years before Ostapenko won one) - and where do we even put Kuznetsova, who was born exactly in 1985, or Pierce from 1975. Serena won the most Slams in the Open Era despite battling against multiple multiple-Slam winners and a larger number of one Slam wonders than previous so-called gens! Who would have guessed.

Overall, the random cut-offs really do not allow to analyze why, for example, there weren't any generation-defining players between Mandlikova (1962) and Graf (1969). Between 1985 and 1995 no ATG was born (ok, there's the case to be made with Sharapova winning all four Slams, but I have no intention to talk about her ever since the doping ban - all discussion about her turns futile quickly after and I am bored about the subject) and many of the players born in that ten (!) year gap may be staples of the weak era, but at least many of them have achieved enough to not let it be a lost generation.

 

I don't know what those numbers stand for... no clue.

 

Why is someone born in 1985 considered part of the same generation as someone born in the mid 90's,and part of an entirely different generation from Serena Williams born 4 years earlier. Seems like the OP is just using arbitrary dateline as an excuse to bash certain players.

 

What a load of BS

 

We all know the Dark Ages began with Schiavone's win, and ended with Kerber's AO.

 

There used to be more variety. The players of the Azarenka, Halep, Wozniacky etc. era were tailored to bash from the baseline with double hand bh and just a strong enough fh and that´s it, their techniques were quite similar and maybe that made them feel like one of the lot, they could win occasionally when everything was right but they were not confident enough to win against players that played almost exactly the same.

When players like Crhis, Martina, Steffi, Hingis, Venus and Serena came to prominence, they all brought something new, today all players keep bringing the same style and techniques that started in the 80´s and 90´s and ended up cannibalizing almost all the field by the 2010´s.