This year’s Australian Open ended on a good note. But do you know that there are still a lot of things that need to be improved to make the tournament better for next year? Due to the unpredictability of match lengths, the tournament scheduling occasionally suffers. Bringing in the example of Coco Gauff‘s match, the director of AO highlighted his plans for the next year.
Analyzing the tournament inside out, Craig Tiley extracted some major reasons behind the timing issues of the tournament. As he revealed his plan to make a big change, he also pointed out a simple issue that is affecting the tournament’s scheduling.
This year, the 19-year-old American tennis player’s quarter-final clash against Marta Kostyuk was no less than a mess. The match went around for 3 hours and 8 minutes. This was not expected, and because of the length of this match, the subsequent matches were delayed. Craig Tiley has already devised a strategy to solve such issues.
Craig Tiley is aware of Australian Open scheduling concerns, says ‘having lets added 15 hours to the tournament’ & the sport needs to consider eliminating them:
“We can’t start before 7 pm because of the news in Australia, so you rule that out… And one thing that we can never… pic.twitter.com/ZSHJIwXQpY
Looking into a similar concern, recently Craig Tiley, who is aware of the tournament’s scheduling concerns, talked about how ‘lets’ in the game were adding 15 hours to the tournament. On the other hand, he shared his belief that eliminating this can add 15 useful hours to the tournament.
He stated, “We can’t start before 7 pm because of the news in Australia, so you rule that out… And one thing that we can never do is predict the length of a match… You’re not going to think Coco is going to play for 3 & a half hours (referring to Marta Kostyuk match). So we also try and put schedules on what we think our matches will go to.”
Although he talked about bringing about such a change, he also highlighted that tennis fans will still get to see the crazy situation where a match finishes at three in the morning. He also talked about another related concern.
Tiley brings another concern to light
While talking about eliminating the lets from the tournament, he also talked about one more idea that can reduce the delay and help improve tournament efficiency. He said in the same interview, “Sometimes the shot clock starts way too late. That should be tightened up.”
He highlighted that the officials would try to tighten the time at which the matches start next year. Along with that, there are also concerns that the sports chief should review the use of shot clocks and manage the beginning time of the match. With a lot of twists coming for next year, it will be interesting to see how the 2025 Australian Open pans out.
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