Before the curtain rises on the 2019 tennis season, a warning to the audience: The script might be confusing because the directors can’t agree on an ending.
The Australian Open, which begins Jan. 14, announced Friday that fifth sets in men’s singles matches and third sets in women’s singles will now conclude with a first-to-10-points tiebreaker at 6-6. That means each of the four Grand Slam tournaments will have a different format for deciding deadlocked matches next year.
The United States Open had been the only Grand Slam event to use a tiebreaker in the final set, playing a standard first-to-seven-points tiebreaker at 6-6. In October, Wimbledon decided to add a standard tiebreaker at 12-12 in the final set. The French Open now stands as the only Grand Slam tournament to have players continue to play out the deciding set until one player leads by two games, which was the previous format at Wimbledon and the Australian Open.
Tennis Australia said that its decision came after extensive consultation with current and former players, commentators, agents and TV analysts.
“We went with a 10-point tiebreak at six-games-all in the final set to ensure the fans still get a special finale to these often epic contests, with the longer tiebreak still then allowing for that one final twist or change of momentum in the contest,” Australian Open tournament director Craig Tiley said in a statement. “This longer tiebreak also can lessen some of the serving dominance that can prevail in the shorter tiebreak.”
The surge of reforms to Grand Slam match formats seems to have been spurred by the pair of marathon Wimbledon men’s singles semifinals in July. The first, between Kevin Anderson and John Isner, went to 26-24 in the fifth set and ended after 6 hours 36 minutes. The semifinal between Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal that followed ended at 10-8 in the fifth set after 5 hours 15 minutes and needed an extra day to finish. Those enduring semifinals delayed the traditional start of the women’s final.
The tennis scoring system, often difficult for newcomers to the sport to learn, has never had so many variations. They could be seen as charming idiosyncrasies, like the changing court surfaces across the calendar, or as evidence of growing fractiousness in a sport whose governing bodies frequently fail to find consensus.
ATP Tour events are different still from Grand Slam tournaments, with all matches being played in a best-of-three-set format instead of the best-of-five format. And then there’s the Davis Cup, which is switching next year from best-of-five matches to best-of-three as part of a radical overhaul to the competition. Davis Cup introduced final-set tiebreakers for the first time in 2016.
The Australian Open will be the first tournament to use a 10-point tiebreaker in singles play. It has been frequently used in doubles, where it has replaced a full third set in doubles matches on the ATP and WTA tours, as well as in mixed doubles at the Grand Slam events outside of Wimbledon.
“2018 has been a sledgehammer to tennis history and traditions,” the retired Australian player Sam Groth wrote on Twitter.
Calls to shorten men’s matches have grown in recent years, especially with many late rounds of Grand Slam events being marred by a player hampered by injury, but there had been little complaint about women’s best-of-three-sets matches. Some of the most memorable matches in women’s tennis this decade have been marathons at the Australian Open. Francesca Schiavone defeated Svetlana Kuznetsova, 16-14, in a third set in 2011, and Simona Halep outlasted Lauren Davis, 15-13, this year in Melbourne.
Chanda Rubin, who won a 16-14 third set over Arantxa Sanchez Vicario in the 1996 Australian Open quarterfinals, praised the change on Twitter.
“As proud as I am of the long tough matches I got through, it is no longer humane to watch athletes almost ‘kill’ themselves to win,” Rubin wrote. “Many times, players don’t realize the long-term toll a match takes. This is a good move that helps player well-being.”
Despite the attention given to long matches, they remain outliers. Most players will play only a small handful of extended matches in their careers. Of Serena Williams’s 376 career Grand Slam singles matches, only six have gone beyond 6-6 in the third, equaling 1.6 percent. For Roger Federer, who has gone beyond 6-6 in the fifth eight times in 393 matches, it’s 2 percent.
John Isner has become the poster boy for long matches. Hs semifinal match against Anderson at Wimbledon this year came eight years after his 11-hour, 5-minute epic against Nicolas Mahut at Wimbledon in 2010, which ended at 70-68 in the fifth. Isner has had a staggering 10.4 percent of his Grand Slam matches go beyond 6-6 in the fifth set
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