How to have common axis labels with ggplot2 and patchwork

Question

Given a dataframe MenRG_Final containing the following variables:

Name	Description
P1DistanceRun	Distance covered by the player
PointNumber	Point number
PointServer	Point server
PointWinner	Point winner
ServeDepth	Serve depth
ServeNumber	Serve number
ServeWidth	Serve direction
Speed_KMH	Serve speed

I would like to make the following plot with ggplot2 consisting in two geom_boxplot with common legend and axis labels:

So far, I've been able to make this plot:

with this R code:

library(tidyverse)
library(patchwork)

theme_set(theme_minimal())

p1 <- ggplot(
  MenRG_Final %>% filter(PointWinner == "Rafael Nadal"), 
  aes(x = PointServer, P1DistanceRun)
) +
  geom_boxplot(aes(fill = ServeNumber)) +
  labs(
    title = "Nadal a gagné le point"
  )

p2 <- ggplot(
  MenRG_Final %>% filter(PointWinner == "Stan Wawrinka"), 
  aes(x = PointServer, P1DistanceRun)
) +
  geom_boxplot(aes(fill = ServeNumber)) + 
  labs(
    title = "Wawrinka a gagné le point",
  ) +
  theme(
    axis.text.y = element_blank(),
    axis.ticks.y = element_blank()
  )

(p1 + p2) + plot_layout(guides = "collect") & ylim(0, 60) & theme(legend.position = "top") & labs(x = "Serveur", y = "Distance Parcourue")

In particular, I'm wondering how can I:

• Change the legend title and labels and put it at the very top of the plot ?
• Have common axis labels using patchwork ?

If you want to play with the data, I made it available in the dataset folder here: https://github.com/Mathieu-R/ggplot2/tree/main

Answer 1

As outlined in the comments you could achieve your desired result easily and with less code by using facetting:

library(ggplot2)

theme_set(theme_minimal())

ggplot(
  MenRG_Final,
  aes(x = PointServer, P1DistanceRun)
) +
  geom_boxplot(aes(fill = ServeNumber)) +
  scale_fill_discrete(labels = c("Premier Service", "Deuxième Service")) +
  facet_wrap(~PointWinner, labeller = labeller(
    PointWinner = c(
      "Rafael Nadal" = "Nadal a gagné le point",
      "Stan Wawrinka" = "Wawrinka a gagné le point"
    )
  )) +
  theme(legend.position = "top") +
  labs(x = "Serveur", y = "Distance Parcourue", fill = NULL)