Who’s got the best drop on tour?
Tarek Momen’s name is most synonymous with the shot; Karim Abdel Gawad surely has the most deceptive drop; while Nour El Sherbini’s long-range guide might be the most undefendable. In this piece, we analyse 300,000 shots to build a detailed picture of drop shots in the elite game: who plays the drop shot most often, who hits the most drop shot winners, and who uses it to set up winning opportunities. In addressing these questions individually, we build towards an understanding of who plays the drop shot most effectively.
To keep the scope of this analysis manageable – and to keep the conclusions meaningful – this piece deals only with the ‘archetypal’ drop shot: players taking the ball short straight. We do not explore, for now, uses of the counter-drop or the rare cross court drop. We define a drop shot as any shot where the second bounce occurred in the front 40% of the court.
Let us first answer the question: Who plays the most drop shots on tour? We analysed over a quarter of a million shots played by top pros, logging how many of these shots were played as drops.
Followers of the men’s tour will be unsurprised to hear that Tarek Momen plays the most drop shots on tour, using this option over 10% of the time. Of the male players we analysed, Paul Coll took the ball short least often: for every 100 shots the Kiwi hits, you can expect him to hit a drop on just 2 or 3 occasions.
Amongst the elite male players, Tarek Momem takes the ball short most often - around 1 in 10 shots. Note that in our current analysis, we are dealing specifically with taking the ball short, not keeping the ball short (i.e. a counter drop).
At the top of the women’s game, Olivia Weaver is the player who plays short most often – on 6% of shots – while Nouran Gohar is most likely to keep the ball out of the front: the reigning World Champion, renowned for her power hitting, plays a drop on fewer than 2% of shots - the least of any player, male or female. You can expect Tarek Momen to hit a drop shot 5 times more often than his female compatriot.
Amongst elite female players, Nouran Gohar is an outlier. The reigning World Champion rarely takes the ball short, just once every 50 shots.
Momen may play the most drops and Gohar the least, but who hits the most winners with their drop shots? We can answer this question by looking only at a player’s drop shots, then logging the number of times those shots were outright winners or forced the opponent to make an error on their next shot. Joelle King has the best conversion rate on tour: King hits one winner with every five shots she takes short. Close at her heels are Nele Gilis and Nour El Sherbini.
When King drops, she’s deadly. Amongst elite players, Joelle King hits the most winners and the fewest errors when taking it short. As we saw above, however, she takes it short less often than all other players (except Gohar).
On the men’s tour, Marwan ElShorbagy is most economical, hitting 1 drop shot winner for every 6 drop shots played. At the other end of the spectrum, Tarek Momen and Diego Elias are relatively uneconomical when looking at drop shot winners. Despite – or perhaps because – they hit a high number of drops all told, relatively few of these, just 8% (or 1 in 12) are winning shots for either player.
Indeed, both sides of the tour hint at an interesting observation: players who hit drop shots less frequently also tend to hit the highest proportion of winners when they do hit a drop. Several factors likely contribute to this phenomenon: when reluctant droppers like Joelle King or Paul Coll do take the ball short, it is probably because a winning opportunity is ‘on’, as opposed to the drop being a working shot as it is for more frequent droppers. It is also possible that because it happens so rarely, a drop shot from these players catches opponents out.
Whatever the combination of factors, it is important to emphasise that Paul Coll’s drop shot winner effectiveness is a direct result of his game plan: if Coll were to play drop shots as often as Tarek Momen, he would not sustain such a high conversation rate of his attacks.
Drop shot winners are one way to end a rally, but attacking is a double-edged sword: playing a drop shot over a drive also means you are more likely to hit the tin. If Joelle King has the best drop shot winner conversion rate, who hits the most errors with their drops shots?
Footage from SquashTV. Ali Farag (black) hits a an error on a forehand drop shot attempt.
Of the players we analysed, this unwanted crown goes to England’s Gina Kennedy, who makes an error 1 in every 5 times she takes the ball short. America’s Amanda Sobhy is in the same ball park. Not only is Joelle King most ruthless when taking it short, she is also most miserly in conceding errors, with fewer than 1 error for every 10 drop shots.
But the player least likely to commit an error on the drop shot comes from the men’s tour: Diego Elias makes an error just once every 14 drops. Paul Coll, who makes the fewest errors overall on the men’s tour, and Tarek Momen are nipping at Elias’ heels. For two players at differing ends of the spectrum in terms of how frequently they play the drop shot, these two are inseparable when it comes to how often they make an error when they do decide to play it short.
Mohamed ElShorbagy and Mazen Hesham hit more tins than winners when taking the ball in. Elias makes the fewest errors, but Marwan is a prolific winner hitter when dropping.
This is an illustration of the importance of a player’s typical playing style: both Coll and Momen hit a drop shot error every 12 times they play a drop shot, but because Coll plays far fewer drops all told than Momen, the Kiwi also makes far fewer drop shot errors. Put differently, for every 1,000 shots played, Momen plays approximately 100 drop shots, of which 8 are winners and 9 are errors. For every 1,000 shots Coll plays, just 30 are drops, 3 of which are winners and around 2.5 are errors. The same relative success rate of drop shots differs dramatically in real terms when playing styles differ as much as Coll’s and Momen’s do.
Looking at how many winners and errors the top pros hit with their drops is revealing, but only tells some of the story. A good drop shot may not win you the rally there and then, but nonetheless trouble your opponent enough for you to hit a winner on your next shot, or the one after that. For the best players in the world, it often takes not just one, but multiple, consecutive, pressurising shots to create an opening from which a rally can be put to bed. To capture how effectively players play the drop shot, we must also consider how often a drop leads to a rally being won - even if the rally doesn’t conclude for another few shots.
With that in mind, we need to consider Who plays the most drop shot ‘set ups’? In the context of this piece, we are using the term ‘set up’ to refer to Shot 1 in a sequence where the same player hits a winner with Shot 3 or Shot 5 – their opponent having hit Shot 2 and Shot 4 in the meantime.
Footage from SquashTV
This video demonstrates what we mean: Diego Elias (grey) takes the ball short with a forehand straight volley drop (Shot 1) and then reads Ali Farag’s two-wall boast (Shot 2) to win the rally with a straight punch (Shot 3). Elias initiated the short game with his straight volley drop, which serves here as the ‘Set up’.
On the men’s side of the tour, the most effective players of a drop shot set up are Mohamed ElShorbagy and Karim Abdel Gawad. Roughly 1 in 10 of their drop shots create sufficient pressure to allow them to put the rally to bed on their next shot or next shot but one. At the other end of the spectrum, the drop shot set-up is relatively underused by Joel Makin: just 1 in 20 (5%) of his drops create these downstream winners.
We saw earlier than Marwan hit plenty of Winners with drop shots. But his drops set up a rally win for him as frequently as they set up a rally win for his opponent. Paul Coll uses the Set-Up well, and very rarely lets his opponent in with a Self-Sabotage.
Joelle King (1 in 8 drops are set ups), Olivia Weaver and Nele Gilis (1 in 10) are in the same ballpark as the top performing men, but head and shoulders above anyone else on tour is Nour El Sherbini. 1 in 6 of Sherbini’s drops lead to her finishing the rally on her next shot or next shot but one. When you add those numbers to the 1 in 5 drops of hers that are outright winners, the combination is lethal.
El Sherbini’s drops lead to her winning the point in the next few shots much more frequently than her losing the point
And just as the counterpart to a drop shot winner is a drop shot unforced error (tin), it’s important to consider those times that a drop shot, though not an error itself, leads to a player losing the rally. These ‘self-sabotage drops’ allow an opponent to hit a winner on their next shot or next shot but one.
Take this clip for example: Paul Coll’s decision to take the ball short on the backhand side immediately backfires: Victor Crouin is quick to read it and counter-attack with a two-wall boast. Coll’s ‘self-sabotage drop’ into the front corner results in him losing the point.
Footage from SquashTV
By combining those drops which were winning shots or which led to winning shots on the one hand, with those drops which were errors or which led to the rally being lost on the other hand, we gain an understanding of which players play drop shots most efficiently.
The best male performer we analysed is Youssef Ibrahim, whose net efficiency on the drop ensures that for every 7 drop shots he plays, he is better off on 2 of them and worse off on 1 of them (14%). The remaining 4 occasions see neither an immediate benefit nor a disadvantage, just a continuation of the rally.
Taking all those times a drop shot gives a player an advantage in the rally (because the drop shot was a Winner or allowed the player to hit a Winner soon after), and subtracting all those times a drop shot backfired (an error, or allowed the opponent to hit a winner soon after). Hesham may have a striking drop shot stun winner, but overall his drop shot is much less effective than Ibrahim’s and Coll’s.
The male performer with most room to improve in this regard is Mazen Hesham: the number of times a Hesham drop shot leads to him losing the rally almost cancels out those times that he benefits from the drop.
In our dataset, Gina Kennedy’s drop shot attacks led to her winning and losing the rally in equal measure: Kennedy is no better off nor any worse for having taken the ball short. Nour El Sherbini and Joelle King are the best female performers, with a net benefit to a drop shot achieved once for every 5 attempts (20 drops per 100 drops).
El Sherbini and King are in a league of their own when it comes to net efficiency of taking it short. The disadvantages of Kennedy’s drops exactly outweigh the gains she gets.
King and Sherbini provide a neat contrast. Despite both players playing the drop equally efficiently, we cannot ignore that Sherbini (1 in 20 shots) plays the drop shot more frequently than King does (1 in 25). When we weight drop shot efficiency by how often a player plays a drop shot, we build a comprehensive understanding of which players play drop shots most effectively.
To be sure, Ibrahim (1 in 12 shots) plays the drop a lot: this combination of efficiency and frequency puts him atop the male standings. And perhaps most worrying for the male tour is that Mostafa Asal has so much room to grow. But the player on tour who plays the drop shot most effectively on either the men’s or women’s tour is the Warrior Princess Nour El Sherbini.
This chart combines the net gains when players take it short (charts above) with how often they take it short (first charts). King and El Sherbini have similar net gains when they take the ball short; but El Sherbini takes the ball short more frequently than King, so pulls ahead of her rival in this regard.
One in 5 of Sherbini’s drops are winners; one in 6 leads to a winner; and just 1 in 8 leads to her losing the rally. At a drop shot every 20 shots, she takes it short slightly less often than the top men, but in keeping with norms on the women’s tour.
Perhaps Sherbini has found the goldilocks approach to drop shots: use this line of attack any more than she does and she wouldn’t benefit from the element of surprise; use this shot any less and she wouldn’t be maximising her skills. Like so much the 7-time world champion does, she’s may have got the drop shot formula ‘just right’.
Data Analysis and Writing by Franek Dzimira, with input from Jamie Harlington