Tennis stars don’t want a late-night curfew to stop matches playing to a finish, the boss of the Australian Open has claimed. Andy Murray slammed the 4.05am finish to his epic win as “disrespectful” and a “farce” – and claimed playing so late could be a health risk.
And former French Open finalist Marketa Vondrousova, who knocked out Wimbledon finalist Ons Jabeur in the early hours of Friday here, claimed: “I think for the body, I don’t think it is healthy to play at 1am. If you’re playing three sets, it’s crazy.”
But Tennis Australia chief executive Craig Tiley went on breakfast TV Down Under to claim: “At this point, there’s no need to alter the schedule.” No matches at Wimbledon can go beyond 11pm because of restrictions imposed by Merton Council.
And Tiley later added: “If the players want a curfew, we can play with a curfew, we would like that. But the feedback we get from the players is that ‘We don’t want to stop the match we’re playing’, nearly 100 per cent say they want to finish any match they’re playing.
“They understand stopping the match when it rains, but I picture a situation where a player comes back from two sets down, it’s 3-3 in the fifth. I’d like to see you walk out on the court and tell the players that they have to come off.” Alex Zverev and Jenson Brooksy finished at 4.54am at Acapulco last year – the latest ever – while the US Open quarter-final between Carlos Alcaraz and Jannick Sinner went on until 2.50am.
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But Tiley, who tried to get the unvaccinated Novak Djokovic into the tournament last year during a pandemic, claimed this is not a trend in the sport. “We had a look at the data, it varies from year to year, mostly conditions driven, especially in Australia, a lot more hot days, and in hot days matches take longer,” he said.
“It’s a combination of things – more equity between the players, the shot-clock giving the players more time because it’s gone from 20 to 25 seconds between points, all these things contribute. You’ve got an anomaly last night in one direction, but we can have an anomaly the other way with short matches too.
“The crux of the thing is taking care of the players’ wellbeing, and we’re constantly getting feedback from players. We’re asking: ‘What can we do to help you shorten matches? We have looked at no let, no warm-up, shorter time between changeover, all elements of the debate. The scoring.
“We’re supporters of best-of-five in Grand Slams, it does create a point of difference. You can’t predict what happens with a match, it could have finished at midnight if Kokkinakis had won the third set. So it’s an ongoing consultancy process, we do it every year, there’s been lots of ideas, but playing one match at night is a risk because what happens if one player gets injured?”
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Jamie Murray has suggested only playing one match in the night session. “We looked at that,” Tiley added. “We do have some challenges, it would mean putting more high ranked players on outside courts. And we added other variables, we made a suggestion about starting earlier, we didn’t get much positive feedback from the players on that. So it’s a balancing act, it always is.”
And Andy Murray claimed the balls in Melbourne were causing longer rallies and slower matches. “I will leave that up to the technicians, who look at all the variables and the technical side of the ball, a lot of measurement takes place on the court,” said Tiley.
“What’s happened this year which has created a perception of variability has been the conditions, there’s more humidity, more moisture in the air, more heat and extreme temps from heat to cool and the rain.” The Scot was particularly scathing about ball kids still working at 4am.
“I agree, I think it’s not ideal to play that late, if it’s something we can avoid we would, but we can’t predict the length of the match,” said Tiley. “Remember that they automatically get the next day off in a situation like that and they regroup. We shouldn’t forget that it was a great match, one of the more memorable matches played at the Australian Open, and that’s why we love Andy.”
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