Tennis Australia chief executive and Australian Open tournament director Craig Tiley has defended scheduling decisions after Thanasi Kokkinakis and Andy Murray’s five-set epic finished after 4am.
Tiley’s defence came after Murray, a player who has experienced a series of post 2am finishes over the course of a long career, was among the chief critics of the finish time of his blockbuster clash with the Aussie.
“I don’t know who it’s beneficial for,” Murray said after the match.
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“We come here after the match and that’s what the discussion is. Rather than it being like, epic Murray-Kokkinakis match, it ends in a bit of a farce.
“Amazingly people stayed until the end. And I really appreciate people doing that and creating an atmosphere for us at the end. I really appreciate that.”
Speaking on Nine’s Today, Tiley said scheduling of grand slams was “extremely difficult”, but the late finish would be part of their annual review after the tournament.
“There are so many variables that go into thinking about how you’re going to make it work each day,” he said.
“Over the last few days we have had extreme heat, we’ve had over five breaks of rain, we’ve had cold.
“It’s Melbourne, but we don’t often get those conditions in such a short period of time.”
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Those delays have meant schedulers have been chasing their tails to get back on-time.
“Generally a women’s match is about an hour-and-a-half, and a men’s match a little over two-and-a-half hours.
“That’s the majority of the length of matches, [and] you work your schedule around that.
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“But you are always going to have an out of the box situation where like last night it goes extra long unexpectedly.”
Tiley said Australian Open schedulers follow a similar pattern to the three other slams, where the morning sessions kick off at 11am, with evening sessions from 7pm.
He said schedules – particularly for the night sessions – would not change.
“You would expect from 7pm to 12am [the evening session] in that five-hour window, you would get two matches.
“We also have to protect the matches. If you just put one match at night and there’s an injury, you don’t have anything for fans or broadcasters.
“At this point there is no need to alter the schedule. We always look at it when we do the debrief like we do every year, we’ve had long matches before, at this point we’ve got to fit the matches in in the 14 days so you don’t have many options.”
Jelena Dokic dismissed criticism of the late finish, saying it happens regularly at slams.
Speaking on Today, she said late – or early – finishes were particularly common at the US Open.
“It is tough – we had bad weather. This happens in tennis more often than not – I just don’t think we sometimes hear about it,” Dokic said.
“At the US Open we always have matches that go to 3 or 4am – it is normal in tennis. Not a lot of other sports have that.
“Yes it’s tough, but I don’t think anybody thought this was going to go on for six hours.”
The latest grand slam finish ever in the Open era was also at the Australian Open, with Lleyton Hewitt defeating Marcos Bagdhatis in a third round match that went the distance in 2008 and finished at 4.34am.
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