By Richard Pagliaro | @Tennis_Now | Thursday, February 15, 2024
The Happy Slam is contemplating a finals flip.
Australian Open event director Craig Tiley is contemplating a radical and historic finals shift.
The AO chief is weighing shifting the Australian Open girls’s remaining to the ultimate Sunday night time of the event and shifting the boys’s remaining, which historically closes the AO, to Saturday night time.
AO officers started discussing the potential shift throughout for the reason that event’s debrief and are at the moment contemplating the change, the Australian Associated Press’s Darren Walton stories.
Traditionally, girls’s Grand Slam finals are performed on the ultimate Saturday adopted by the boys’s remaining on Sunday.
So why would the Australian Open tip custom?
Three causes the AO is contemplating this main schedule shift, based on the AAP report:
1. Increasing followers, reducing late-night finishes
2. Television
3. Spotlighting girls’s tennis.
Australian officers have actively tried to cut back the prospect of late-night finishes.
Jannik Sinner rallied from two units right down to defeat Daniil Medvedev 3-6, 3-6, 6-4, 6-4, 6-3 in final month’s Australian Open males’s remaining to seize his maiden main title.
The three hour, 44-minute males’s remaining 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 night time solely to wake-up to the information of Sinner’s comeback conquest.
Moving the boys’s remaining to Saturday night time would means if the boys’s remaining is a marathon—5 of the final eight AO males’s remaining have gone the five-set distance—it could 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 permitted, would imply the AO males’s remaining would air late Friday night time/early Saturday morning East Coast time on ESPN within the United States.
Since the ladies’s remaining is best-of-three-sets, even when the ultimate went the gap, it could possible wrap by 11 p.m. Melbourne time if performed on a Sunday.
Additionally, the Australian Open can be utterly distinctive as the one one of many 4 Grand Slam tournaments to play the boys’s remaining on a Saturday and ladies’s remaining on a Sunday, spotlighting girls’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 Tours’ approval—although the event will seek the advice of with the gamers if it makes the change, the AAP stories.
Tournament director Tiley, who has been open to alter throughout his tenure, says all choices are on the desk, based on the AAP.
Photo credit score: Robert Prange/Getty
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