Alright, so today I’m gonna walk you through my little experiment: Ostapenko versus Kasatkina. Sounds fancy, right? But trust me, it’s just me messing around with some data.
It all started when I stumbled upon some tennis stats. You know, those boring tables with numbers that no one really looks at. But something caught my eye – the head-to-head record between Ostapenko and Kasatkina. Two players with totally different styles. Ostapenko, the aggressive baseliner, and Kasatkina, the crafty counter-puncher.
First things first, I had to grab the data. I found a few websites with match history, and I basically copy-pasted everything into a spreadsheet. Yeah, I know, super high-tech. It was messy, dates all over the place, different tournament names, the whole shebang.
Then came the cleaning part. This was probably the most tedious thing I did. I had to standardize the dates, remove irrelevant columns, and make sure the player names were consistent. I used some simple Excel formulas to split and rearrange the text. Nothing fancy, just good old manual labor.
Okay, with the data looking somewhat presentable, I wanted to visualize it. I wanted to see at a glance who was winning more often. I used the “countif” function in excel to count the number of wins for each player. It was super basic, just a simple bar chart showing the number of wins for each player.
After that, I wanted to dig deeper I wanted to see if there were any trends in their matches, like, does one player tend to win on a specific surface? So, I added a new column for surface type (hard, clay, grass) and again, used “countif” to count the number of wins on each surface for each player. Another bar chart, this time grouped by surface type. It was interesting to see some patterns emerge. Ostapenko seems to do better on grass, while Kasatkina is stronger on clay, etc.
Finally, I wanted to see if there’s some evolution in their head-to-head, like is one player doing much better in recent years? To find out, i add a new column with the year. then i filtered the data to just focus on, say, the last 5 years, and recalculated the win counts. Another bar chart showing how the wins changed over time.
So, yeah, that was my little experiment. It wasn’t anything groundbreaking, but it was a fun way to play with some data and learn a bit more about these two players. It just involved grabbing data, cleaning it up, doing some simple calculations, and creating basic charts to visualize the results. The end.
