Hope floats after long wait, anxiety
MUMBAI: “Am tomorrow?”
Nick Kyrgios’s tweet post the midnight of February 3 in Melbourne perhaps encapsulates the complex bordering on the chaotic build-up to the season’s first Grand Slam. It came minutes before the organisers cancelled play for a day in six warm-up tournaments last week due to a worker in one of the hotels hosting the participants testing Covid-19 positive.
One positive case, more than 500 players and support staff sent into isolation for 24 hours before being tested, a hectic day’s action paused: Welcome to the 2021 Australian Open, which begins on Monday after months of uncertainty and weeks of delay owing to the pandemic. Two Grand Slams in New York and Paris have been held in the post-covid world last year but neither was quite like the Melbourne curtain-raiser for the new season. For starters, they didn’t require 17 charter flights ferrying around 1,200 players, support staff and officials from various destinations into Melbourne. They didn’t require a 14-day quarantine period for all players upon arrival. They didn’t require players to stick to a fivehour daily restriction for training during the period. They didn’t require 72 players to be locked inside their rooms for two weeks due to a handful of passengers testing positive in three flights.
Yet, after all those hurdles and last-minute change of plans,
I playing players can now look forward to playing some tennis in front of up to 30,000 spectators per day (50% of full capacity) as opposed to a few thousand in Paris and none in New York.
What also makes this Grand Slam the most unpredictable in recent times is the unique build-up to it. Players will head to Melbourne Park after weeks of complete or partial inaction followed by little game time in six warm-up tournaments cramped into seven days. The scheduling has resulted in niggles, injuries and a host of withdrawals from the tune-up events.
“You can see that being in a room for two weeks, not playing, practicing, it’s not the same as playing a match,” defending champion Sofia Kenin, who dealt with a sore leg in the WTA warm-up event, said in a press conference on Saturday.
“It’s obviously different but everyone’s going to be ready for
Australian Open, for sure.”
Djokovic to the distance in the final last year.