The ‘unhealthy’ tennis trend angering players after Djokovic’s 3am finish

ROLAND GARROS — The metro had stopped running, every bar within a mile had shut, the majority of Paris was in bed – but Novak Djokovic was still playing tennis.

It was not by choice. He did not even make it on court until after 10.30pm at the French Open on Saturday, and then Lorenzo Musetti produced one of his best performances of recent years to force Djokovic to five sets.

They were on court for four hours and 29 minutes in total, finishing at 3.07am, and while the world No 1 emerged victorious, even he admitted it had taken plenty out of him.

“I’m going to have to switch all of my young genes and try and recover as quick as possible,” Djokovic said.

The Serb, 37, had a day off on Sunday, not even scheduled to practise the day before his fourth-round match against Francisco Cerundolo. But that day of rest alone will not be enough.

“By the time he goes to bed it’s probably like 6am,” explains Jamie Murray, a doubles player with two decades of experience on tour and now in a role as the tournament director at Queen’s, making a point later reiterated by both Iga Swiatek and Coco Gauff.

“Then you’re totally goosed the next day, and then the next day is a battle as well.

“It won’t be easy for Novak to recover. It’s not like he’s 25 any more either.”

Djokovic tried not to criticise the tournament authorities for fear of overshadowing the effort his opponent had put in.

“I don’t want to get into it,” he said, but then added: “I think some things could’ve been handled different way. But there’s beauty as well winning the match at 3.30am.”

Beauty perhaps, but not much sense or fun. Mirra Andreeva, 17, beat Victoria Azarenka in a thrilling match that finished at 1am on Wednesday. It had not started until after 10pm.

“Im usually already in bed by that time, but then I was just going to warm up before the match. That was tough,” Andreeva said.

“I was really happy that people, they stayed until the end because usually what I’ve seen is that when you play a late match, there’s not a lot of people and you’re, like, in the dark.”

Even if people do stay, is it really worth the damage to the players’ welfare?

“I definitely think it’s not healthy,” Gauff says. “It may be not fair for those who have to play late because it does ruin your schedule. I’ve been lucky I haven’t been put in a super late finish yet.

“It’s a complicated thing, but I definitely think for the health and safety of the players it would be in the sport’s best interest I think to try to avoid those matches finishing, or starting, after a certain time.”

And i understands that Swiatek specifically requests not to play the night match at Roland Garros because it disrupts her sleep schedule – so she is unlikely ever to suffer at the hands of the schedulers, but also knows that beyond asking nicely, it’s out of her control.

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“I was always one of the players that said that we should start a little bit earlier,” Swiatek said.

“I don’t know if the fans are watching these matches if they have to go to work next day or something when the matches are finishing at 2am or 3am.

“It’s not up to us. We need to accept anything that is going to come to us.”

The power currently lies with Amazon Prime Video, which has a multimillion euro deal to show one match in the night session on Court Philippe-Chatrier, where the start time has been nudged forward from 8.45pm to 8.30pm – but that ended up getting pushed back more than two hours on Saturday by a rain-affected match that was added to the main court’s schedule.

Increasingly though, players are speaking out about scheduling that puts TV companies’ wishes over their “health and safety”.

On the regular tour, rules are now in place that ban any match from starting after 11pm and limit the number of matches on a court each day to five to reduce congestion. The hope is that the grand slams may adopt something similar.

However, those regulations would not have saved Djokovic and Musetti, nor Andy Murray and Thanasi Kokkinakis in Australia when they recorded the second-latest grand slam finish in history last year, finishing after 4am at the Australian Open.

The real problem is that tennis matches are getting longer. Balls bounce off the courts slower and higher, players are fitter and more accurate, points are longer and therefore matches too, none of which tennis has taken any steps to address. In fact, the consensus in the locker room at the Australian Open was that the latest generation of balls are even slower through the air and more affected by weather conditions.

And while French Open organisers have not handled the tournament perfectly, they cannot be blamed for the weather – which has numerous knock-on effects on how long every match takes.

Quite apart from matches being delayed by rain – against which they have mitigated by unveiling their second retractable roof this year – the conditions when play actually does break out have been cold and damp.

“It was unbelievably slow,” said British doubles player Henry Patten after winning in the second round with partner Harri Heliovaara, beating Luke Johnson and Skander Mansouri.

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“Both me and Harri were surprised at how slow Skander’s serve was coming down. It shocked both of us because usually his serve is massive.

“It was tricky. The balls are picking up a lot of clay and they’re already heavy, so they were even heavier.”

Such conditions make almost everything that tends to speed up a match harder to do, like holding serve and hitting winners.

“It was so muddy and so heavy conditions, very cold, balls were not going anywhere,” Djokovic agreed.

“So you wouldn’t get too many free points with the serve so you have to work every single point of the night tonight and that’s why [it went on so long]. I really physically pushed myself to the very limit to win this match.”

Four years ago when Rafael Nadal managed the previous latest finish at 1.26am, he said the cold conditions could even be dangerous. It did not help that the tournament that year was also played in October because of the Covid pandemic.

There have been some concessions to the players’ complaints. Play on Chatrier will start an hour earlier at 11am in the second week, although organisers insist this was always the plan. Perhaps in future years they will extend that to the first week, when at present the main court lies vacant for the first hour of general play.

And you have to have some sympathy for tournament organisers when Saturday’s elongated schedule is followed by what happened on Sunday: Swiatek, Gauff and Carlos Alcaraz lost just 10 games between them and the day session was finished by 4.30pm. They even had to draft in a mixed doubles match to pad things out.

But that is probably better than teenager Andreeva’s succinct verdict on night tennis: “It’s so depressing, no one is watching, and it’s cold.”