By Richard Pagliaro | @Tennis_Now | Thursday, February 15, 2024
The Pleased Slam is contemplating a finals flip.
Australian Open event director Craig Tiley is contemplating a radical and historic finals shift.
Extra: Richard Evans Q&A
The AO chief is weighing transferring the Australian Open ladies’s last to the ultimate Sunday evening of the event and shifting the lads’s last, which historically closes the AO, to Saturday evening.
AO officers started discussing the potential shift throughout because the event’s debrief and are presently contemplating the change, the Australian Related Press’s Darren Walton studies.
Historically, ladies’s Grand Slam finals are performed on the ultimate Saturday adopted by the lads’s last on Sunday.
So why would the Australian Open tip custom?
Three causes the AO is contemplating this main schedule shift, in line with the AAP report:
1. Growing followers, reducing late-night finishes
2. Tv
3. Spotlighting ladies’s tennis.
Australian officers have actively tried to scale back the prospect of late-night finishes.
Jannik Sinner rallied from two units all the way down to defeat Daniil Medvedev 3-6, 3-6, 6-4, 6-4, 6-3 in final month’s Australian Open males’s last to seize his maiden main title.
The three hour, 44-minute males’s last meant some Aussie followers, who needed to be up early for work on the next Monday morning, went to mattress with the lanky Italian down within the match on Sunday evening solely to wake-up to the information of Sinner’s comeback conquest.
Shifting the lads’s last to Saturday evening would means if the lads’s last is a marathon—5 of the final eight AO males’s last have gone the five-set distance—it will not current the issue for many followers of getting to show off tennis and wake-up early for work the subsequent day.
The transfer, if authorised, would imply the AO males’s last would air late Friday evening/early Saturday morning East Coast time on ESPN in the US.
For the reason that ladies’s last is best-of-three-sets, even when the ultimate went the space, it will seemingly wrap by 11 p.m. Melbourne time if performed on a Sunday.
Moreover, the Australian Open could be fully distinctive as the one one of many 4 Grand Slam tournaments to play the lads’s last on a Saturday and ladies’s last on a Sunday, spotlighting ladies’s tennis on the ultimate day of the event.
The Australian Open wouldn’t want approval from the ATP or WTA to make the transfer—bear in mind the AO debuted as a 15-day event final month with out requiring the Excursions’ approval—although the event will seek the advice of with the gamers if it makes the change, the AAP studies.
Match director Tiley, who has been open to alter throughout his tenure, says all choices are on the desk, in line with the AAP.
Picture credit score: Robert Prange/Getty
