We must see Australian Open tennis stars at their best, not at 4am

Isn’t it beautiful being able to watch Australian Open tennis at 4:30pm in the United Kingdom? Well, actually it isn’t.

While we in the UK can enjoy Andy Murray on a Thursday afternoon, or Victoria Azarenka yesterday at 2pm, those athletes are playing deep into the morning. That’s not right.

Yes, the hours suit those of us on our sofas in the afternoon but they simply cannot bring the best out of the athletes on the other side of the world competing at the highest level.

Take former world No1 Murray, for example: 35 years old, with a metal hip and competing into the early hours in his third round match. He finished later than most Gen Z partiers would have got home from the club.

He, like the umpire and ball kids, were denied rest and toilet breaks throughout the match, which lasted five hours.

Tennis is a sport where the smallest lapses in concentration can be decisive in the final result – and we’re forcing this on players for our own enjoyment. It’s not right.

Tennis needs to market itself better. We may have seen that with the release of Break Point – from which all 10 major participants are now out of the Australian Open – but forcing athletes to compete when they’re knackered is not the answer.

And while Murray’s epic win last week saw a mostly full Rod Laver Arena, last night’s Azarenka duel drew, at most, a couple of thousand spectators.

Too much Australian Open?

Because there is such a thing as too much tennis in a day.

The Australian Open should look to organise its schedule better, whereby a potential women’s three-set match doesn’t follow two men’s matches in which fans could be in for 10 sets. 

Make the women’s match the star of any given session and pair it with a doubles match, offering fans a different style of tennis, or a legends match, where you could relax the atmosphere for those watching.

The long nights and stacked schedule timings don’t help anyone except us Brits who wake up and fancy listening to or watching something on our commute.

Athletes should be at the forefront of any plans – we rarely see a late finish at the French Open or at Wimbledon, for example.

And of course time zone management is a key element of planning at the Australian Open – the isolated location Down Under doesn’t lend itself to the other major tennis-playing nations – but that shouldn’t trump all else.

In an era where we are seeing the greats less and less – and soon never at all – tennis bigwigs must do all they can to ensure fans still want to go to the Grand Slams and big tour events to watch the new stars of the sport in person. 

That starts with matches finishing at a reasonable time.

I love tennis and I love the battles, but I don’t see how I will continue to love the game when its biggest stars are playing at below their best because it’s 3am wherever they’re serving.