Clocks, coverage and cover: What’s new this year?
The shot-clock
Fed up with watching Rafael Nadal rearrange his hair, eyebrows and underwear before each serve? Had enough of Novak Djokovic’s interminable ball-bouncing? Never fear, because the shot-clock is here.
Except that the new system – which will make its grand slam debut in New York next week – appears to be actively making play slower.
A visible 25-second countdown clock has been trialled over the past month. But as the writer and analyst Jeff Sackmann pointed out last week: “At each of the tournaments – Toronto, Montreal, San Jose, and Washington, DC – the average point took longer in 2018 than it did in 2017.”
Sackmann also looked at certain repeat offenders. In 2017, Nadal was the slowest man on the ATP tour, averaging 45.2 seconds per point, while Roger Federer came in at 35.7. (Bear in mind that these figures include changeover times.) But in five matches at the recent Rogers Cup in Toronto, Nadal’s figure climbed to 47.2sec.
The results are surprising. We can only assume that, having previously worked off their internal clocks, players are now timing their serves so that they strike the ball when the clock is almost at zero.
There is also an inbuilt delay, as the countdown only starts once the chair umpire has entered the result of the previous point. The umpires usually allow a few extra seconds after a lengthy and exciting rally, so that the crowd can settle down.
Sackmann concludes that tennis executives “will need to find a solution elsewhere” to the problem of slow play.
Perhaps, though, a minor adjustment is all that is required. Limit the clock to 20 seconds – which was originally the guideline listed in the grand-slam handbook in any case – and play should accelerate by a significant margin.
The second roof
The US Open’s main arena – the 24,000-capacity Arthur Ashe Stadium – received its roof two years ago. The project put a stop to those maddening Monday finals, held over from Sunday because of bad weather, which had dogged the tournament for years.
Now the second-string Louis Armstrong Stadium has been equipped with a retractable roof of its own, as well as an upgrade that has increased its capacity to 14,000 seats. It is a development being mirrored at Wimbledon, where Court No 1 will boast a roof from next year.
Long-serving US Open reporters still remember the days when Louis Armstrong Stadium hosted the finals.
The inhabitants of the highaltitude press box were regularly deafened by passenger jets on their way to nearby Laguardia Airport, which kept roaring in over their left shoulders. But after the construction of the new roof, that sense of being bang in the middle of the flight path is likely to be greatly diminished.
Amazon Prime
Sky Sports showed so little regard for its tennis coverage – preferring to invest in football, cricket, golf and Formula One – that all the rights have now migrated to Amazon Prime’s streaming service. The shift will begin with the US Open and continue with the whole ATP tour next year.
Next week’s coverage from New York will retain several familiar faces and voices from the previous era, including Mark Petchey and Barry Cowan, while Tennis Podcast founder Catherine Whitaker comes in as co-host alongside BBC Radio 4’s Karthi Gnanasegaram.
But amid all the hype, spare a thought for Marcus Buckland, an excellent anchorman for Sky’s coverage over the last decade, who is too closely associated with the old regime to win a transfer.