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Do Indian locals play better than their ranking at home too?

Atithee wrote: ↑Sun Mar 21, 2021 6:14 am Do Indian locals play better than their ranking at home too?

I guess there is a kind of similarity that you see on hard courts world over and hence there might not be any home advantage there. The weather is different for different countries and may provide home advantage but little.

But as for clay courts, I keep hearing how courts in Italy are different from that in Germany which again are from French who are different from Spain.... So maybe there is some definite home advantage as you are used to the pace and bounce.

But all this is my guess.

Atithee wrote: ↑Sun Mar 21, 2021 6:14 am Do Indian locals play better than their ranking at home too?

Yes. If you look at singles trophies Sania won or Somdev's finals appearances, they had a much better rate in tournaments at home. Sania's only championship in singles was in Hyderabad. She could not replicate it elsewhere although here Stanford final was at a tier II tournament than a tier IV Hyderabad win.

That was sarcasm for the preemptive loss reasoning! We just witnessed the non-performance of Indian men and women in the futures tournaments a week ago. Citing one Somdev or Sania doesn’t change the facts.

prasen9 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 21, 2021 3:01 pm If you look at singles trophies Sania won or Somdev's finals appearances, they had a much better rate in tournaments at home. Sania's only championship in singles was in Hyderabad.

There are even more examples. Like Leander's. His win over Federer was at INDIAN Wells, and against Sampras was at INDIANapolis.

I know but I think Indian players perform better at home than abroad too a lot. Whether that used to be because players would not come to India to play or otherwise, I do not know. I know that across the world, home players win a bit more than outside their home. That is no excuse though for losing to someone ranked 300+. Knowing Sameer, he was not making that excuse. He was saying that Sumit needs to take it seriously otherwise, he can lose.

Just take anyone. Here's Yuki. 3 challenger titles at home and 4 abroad. 2 runners-up at home and 3 abroad. Assuming he may have played less than 20% of his challengers at home, this is remarkable asymmetry that cannot be explained by anything other than home advantage.

jayakris wrote: ↑Sun Mar 21, 2021 3:46 pm There are even more examples. Like Leander's. His win over Federer was at INDIAN Wells, and against Sampras was at INDIANapolis.

I see that Jai in Canada’s return has rubbed off on you. Nice one, Jay in Irvine!

Oh, Jay loves word play and humour.

Leander won his only ATP tournament in Newport. That is most possibly because we did not have ATP level tournaments in India during his prime. Certainly not on grass, his favorite subject. But, if you look at his challengers, he won 6 out of his 11 challenger wins in India. Our of the three runner-ups, two are in India and one abroad. Again, given that most of the time they play outside India, these are staggering numbers and can only be explained by home advantage. You can keep doing it for most Indian players and it is true.

Now, since we have drive this to , will a kind mod move this to the General Tennis thread or Indian tennis players thread or something like that? If there is no good fit, then leaving it here is fine, I suppose.

jayakris wrote: ↑Sun Mar 21, 2021 3:46 pm

prasen9 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 21, 2021 3:01 pm If you look at singles trophies Sania won or Somdev's finals appearances, they had a much better rate in tournaments at home. Sania's only championship in singles was in Hyderabad.

There are even more examples. Like Leander's. His win over Federer was at INDIAN Wells, and against Sampras was at INDIANapolis.

Of course, Indians like others play better at home! 5 of the 12 challenger finals by Yuki have been at home whereas less than 10% of the challengers he has played have been at home. Same with Prajnesh, Sumit etc.

Of course, the home advantage only goes so far. If the opponent is a lot better than the home court advantage isn't enough. In the recent futures, we mostly had third tier Indian players playing, so the gap in quality was too much to overcome...

Rather than counting 2-3 people as examples, please look at all the Indians who play at home. You will find that, on an average, there is no evidence that Indian players play better at home. I suspect they rarely win a tournament when all data and conditions point to the reasonableness of that happening. Just look at the recent futures series, where our heralded players bombed. Hardly any of them even reached the finals. If this is not coming across, then so be it.

Atithee wrote: ↑Sun Mar 21, 2021 9:03 pm Rather than counting 2-3 people as examples, please look at all the Indians who play at home. You will find that, on an average, there is no evidence that Indian players play better at home. I suspect they rarely win a tournament when all data and conditions point to the reasonableness of that happening. Just look at the recent futures series, where our heralded players bombed. Hardly any of them even reached the finals. If this is not coming across, then so be it.

Which "heralded" players are you talking about? Perhaps, Saketh? He got to the finals in the first futures and then promptly got injured. No one else would qualify as "heralded" unless you are using some other definition....

There is another reason why Atithee may be right in what he is saying. Indian events have traditionally been pretty poor in entry list. Lots of players who can make the list in India stay away and go to tougher events elsewhere because India still has the reputation for Delhi Belly. Food issues. That is what I have heard as the biggest reason (along with long-flight issues) why they don't want to take a chance on coming to India.

Anyway, a big reason why most top Indian players have their better results at home is simply that they were playing against a worse field. I guess that is also some sort of a home advantage, but a true home advantage is when you are able to beat players of similar ranking at a higher frequency at home than abroad. I don't think there is clear evidence in the record of those like Sania, Somdev, LP, Yuki, etc, that they were able to beat players of a certain level more often at home than abroad. In fact they may have had more frequent upset losses in India than abroad.

Indians typically play against the easiest field-of-players in the subcontinent events (with the exception of some African events they may go to). Thus, many have their best results in India. That may be all!

I have felt for quite some time, that Indians have not retained any home field advantage except for Delhi Belly. Till 10-15 years ago we had an advantage on the Indian grass courts (traditionally a soft ground with the worst uneven bounce in the world), but we lost (no, gave up!) that advantage at least 10 years ago by discontinuing grass tennis altogether. So none of the youngsters know grass tennis much. Till 15-20 years ago, some of the Indian players had an advantage on Indian clay and cowdung courts (which were never really clay but a hard and very fast surface with sandy soil on top). Most Indian players now don't know how to play on it either, like say the Prahlad Srinaths or Harsh Mankads knew. They all have access to much more hard courts now, and that's where they practice. So, any court-surface advantage is also all gone. Only the Delhi Belly advantage remains! That is what I feel.

If you want averages of all players, I do not have the wherewithal to do the calculations. But, if you pick any random player and their home records are much better, then we are indeed doing much better at home. If you want, we can choose a random player and test it in good faith. I cannot calculate the averages of all players.

Then, again, it depends upon how you phrase the question. What Jay says used to be true. Top players would not come to India. So, Indians would win more at home. So, I do not know if they overachieved at home and underachieved. And, how do you test this anyway if their ranking is fluff? A lot of Indians would have inflated rankings because they won points at home when people did not come. So, I do not know what we are talking about at this point. What is the true (hidden) ranking of a player? Maybe taking an ELO ranking would be useful. But, again I do not have the data or the means to test it. All I can do is draw a bunch of random samples and check on the samples.

What Jay is saying is our players do well in home tournaments aa the fields are generally weaker. But that is largely irrelevent to the original statement which I made " Players generally do better than their rankings at home ".

What is to be examined is if our players did better than their seeding at home tournaments whatever the field was at that tournament.

Prasen raised another point that our players may have an inflated ranking. But, that is generally not true for our challenger level players as there are very few challengers in India. Maybe true for futures level.

I will try to gather some data later for our top 5-6 players in the last 4-5 years and put it here after some time.

I didn’t want to say more, but I started the argument, so please allow me to make a request, Sameer. In your research, I simply would like you to take all Indian players (not just top 5) and tabulate a win loss ratio when the foreign opponent is ranked higher than the Indian player. If home advantage holds, then we should see a lot more Indian players beating their much higher ranked often than not. I hope this makes sense. It’s not about seeding or winning a tournament only or Sania, Yuki, Somdev in isolation. It’s about collective performance of Indian players’ performance at home.