3.33am, the starting point
Carlos Alcaraz still hasn’t shaken off that night. Dumped out of the US Open by Ben Shelton after a quarter-final that finished at 3.33am, the Spaniard used a press conference in London, on the fringes of the Laver Cup, to call for an end to these marathon Grand Slam finishes. The contest, wrapped up in five sets and four hours 28 (6-7, 6-1, 6-3, 1-6, 7-6), remains the latest in US Open history.
“For a player who finishes at 3.30 in the morning, that means we leave the courts at 4.30, then go back to the hotel. You don’t get to sleep until 6.30 or 7,” said the world No 3. “If you have to recover for the next match, the other guy has the edge. I’m not even talking about 3.30am, even finishing at midnight is already too late.”
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A recurring problem, with no easy fix
Alcaraz is hardly the first to complain. At Roland-Garros in 2024, Novak Djokovic beat Lorenzo Musetti at 3.07am. At Wimbledon, matches are capped by a 11pm curfew. The US Open, Roland-Garros and the Australian Open still have no hard stop in place.
Two solutions keep getting floated to bring things to a close earlier: switch the men’s Grand Slams to best-of-three, already used elsewhere on the ATP Tour, or trim each set to four games instead of six, as Djokovic suggested last August.
Agassi backs the gladiator
Not everyone sees it that way. As World Team captain at the Laver Cup, Andre Agassi, an eight-time Grand Slam winner, is firmly in favour of keeping things as they are. “I’m absolutely convinced we should keep the five-set format,” the American said, even if he admitted the scheduling issue is real. “We don’t want it going that late. It’s unfortunate. I’ve found myself in that spot plenty of times. But this is still a gladiator sport. I love that.”
For Agassi, the real divide should be somewhere else: “There has to be a distinction between winning the Grand Slams, the biggest tournaments, and the other weeks of the year.” A neat defence, perhaps, but it still leaves the late-night headache exactly where it was.
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