Taylor Fritz played a pretty decent match at the 2023 Swiss Indoors in Basel, but he lost the match despite winning 10 points more than his opponent.
Scoring in sports is generally pretty straightforward. In most sports, the bigger number usually wins, and while tennis is the same, there is some nuance to it. For example, you might win a match despite winning fewer games, and you might win a match despite winning fewer points.
It doesn't happen often, but it's possible, which isn't the case for almost any other sports. You can't score fewer goals in football and win the match, the same way you can score fewer points in basketball and win the match.
In tennis, though, you can, and that's what happened to Taylor Fritz in Basel, though he found himself on the wrong side of that oddity. So, how did it exactly happen?
Well, he faced Russian talent Alexander Shevchenko, who is the fiance of fellow tennis player Anastasia Potapova. The Russian endured quite a stressful match against Fritz. He faced 15 break points in the match and incredibly, he managed to save all of them.
Fritz finished the match 0/15 on break points, which you rarely see. The Russian's victory came after three hours of battling and three tiebreaks. Shevchenko won 10 fewer points than Fritz but still won the match because of the way the games went.
There were a lot of games on Fritz's serve where Shevchenko barely won any points, while Fritz regularly pushed his opponent to a deuce in most of his games. That's easily demonstrated by Fritz winning 48 points on return while Shevchenko won only 27.
It was just a heartbreaking loss for Fritz, who needs the win as he's fighting for a spot in Turin. He lamented the match on X after by writing:
"Tennis is rough."
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