Marathon matches a point of concern
There will be no need for a plaque outside Court 1 at Wimbledon.
Concern was understandable on Saturday as John Isner and Nicolas Mahut --- sorry, Marin Cilic --- walked back onto the grass for a second day of play in their second-round match.
Isner and Cilic had stopped because of darkness on Friday with the score at 10-10 in the fifth set, which might sound extraordinary until you remember that Isner did not finish off Mahut until 70-68 in the fifth set in the first round of Wimbledon in 2010.
Clearly, that ten - nis record —beyond Beamonesque — was in no danger, but there was certainly the threat of plenty more tennis. Isner and Cilic are veterans with big serves and plenty of reach.
The spectators in the stands and scribes in the press seats settled in for an extended dose of sunshine and fast-twitch tennis. Instead, they saw only two games as Cilic held serve with an ace to 11-10 and then broke Isner’s serve after a four-deuce game to win, 7-6 (4), 6-7 (6), 6-4, 6-7 (4), 12-10.
Isner played on (and on) without cracking against Mahut in 2010 for 11 hours, 5 minutes over three days, an achievement commemorated with a plaque outside Court 18.
The question is, how much longer will men like Isner and Cilic be required to play 22 games in the final set to decide a winner?
The US Open remains the only Grand Slam tournament to use a fifth-set tiebreaker, which it introduced in 1970. The Australian Open used the same system in the 1970s and early 1980s before reverting to an advantage set in the fifth in which a player must win by two games.
Craig Tiley, tournament director of the Australian Open, said on Saturday that a fifth-set tiebreaker was “not on our radar”. The other two Grand Slam events — the French Open and Wimbledon —have never abandoned the advantage set in the fifth, and according t o Richard Lewis, chief executive officer at Wimbledon, there has been no recent discussion of a change. Matches such as Saturday’s can indeed wreak havoc on the schedule. But above all, such matches wreak havoc on the combatants.
Even the winner will soon be a loser, worn out mentally and physically.
In the past 10 seasons, 11 men’s matches have stretched to 30 games or more in the fifth set. In all cases, the winner lost in the next two rounds except for Roger Federer, and that was because Federer did not have to play another round; his 5-7, 7-6 (6), 7-6 (5), 3-6, 16-14 win over Andy Roddick came in the 2009 Wimbledon final.
Stretching into the tennis equivalent of overtime does lend an epic quality that fifth-set tiebreakers cannot bestow. It also piques interest --- how not to care more about the result as a fan when the players have invested so many games and hours in the outcome?
But in a sport already quite rightly concerned about the pace of play, the fifth-set marathon seems ever more out of step with the times. And regardless of Wimbledon, another venerable event is moving toward change.