Tournament director Craig Tiley stated on Monday that despite the addition of an extra day to help with fixture congestion, late finishes are inevitable at the Australian Open.
The Australian Open is known for its late finishes, with a match between Lleyton Hewitt and Marcos Baghdatis famously ending at 4:33 a.m. in 2008.
The final match of the first day of the 15-day Australian Open this year began at 11:41 p.m. (1241 GMT) after Novak Djokovic’s first-round match took more than four hours to complete.
Aryna Sabalenka, the defending women’s champion, managed to finish her tournament opener in less than an hour. However, Tiley warned that players should be prepared to play into the early hours at Melbourne Park on occasion.
“We finished at 12:35 a.m. and we have taken the edge off having the possibility of late finishes,” Tiley told Australia’s Channel Nine on Monday. “Nobody could predict that Novak would have gone over four hours to play a qualifier. No one would have predicted that putting a schedule on.”
“It’s going to happen and it will happen again, it could happen tonight or tomorrow night.”
This month, the WTA and ATP Tours jointly announced limitations on the number of matches that can be scheduled on a court in an evening session, and also banned contests from beginning after 11 p.m. in the interests of player welfare. However, the four Grand Slams are not bound by these rules.
While Tennis Australia claimed that the extra day was added with player welfare in mind, former world number one John McEnroe described it as a “money grab”.
Players, including Djokovic, supported the tournament extension if it resulted in fewer late finishes. On Sunday, 87,705 fans attended the Melbourne Park precinct.
(Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, editing by Peter Rutherford)
