When is 'too late' 'too early'?

Many factors must be considered: Facility capacity; Who is playing; Who the crowd want to see more; Number of matches to schedule per court; How much time to allocate per match; What is the latest start time that is “reasonable” for fans and players; And when to postpone a match until the next day.

Most sports, especially team sports, are easy to schedule. They are a set duration. Football is 45 minutes each half, with 15 minutes in-between for half time. Only on vary rare occasions would extra-time and possibly penalties change this, causing some level of disruption to the TV networks, having to cancel the following programme. This is seldom and of minimal impact or consequence, and there is always a contingency plan in place because it is only possible in certain scenarios.

Many individual sports, like tennis and squash, are a much different ‘kettle of fish’.

When planning a daily schedule for a major squash tournament, we would usually schedule 45-60 minutes per match. However, matches may be done in 30 minutes, or 120 minutes. If you have scheduled two 45 minutes slots for two back-to-back matches, and both these matches then take 90 minutes - you’re way behind schedule already. And there might be another 6 matches scheduled after those. Cue chaos in the head of the organiser…!

Tennis can be even crazier. Matches are usually expected to take between 90 and 120 minutes, and the schedule usually places a time on the first match of the day (around midday), and the subsequent matches just say, “to follow”. But what if you have a 4 ½ hour epic like the Ben Shelton vs Carlos Alcaraz match this week at the US Open? And what if this match is already running late because of the extended matches preceding it? This is when you have matches being played until 3.30AM!

However, what can be done? What is best for the crowd and the players?

The match could have been stopped at midnight and resumed the next morning. I’m not sure the crowd or players would actually want this. The crowd would miss out on a full match between two players they’ve waited all day to see, and if they do not have tickets for the next day, or have other plans, they don’t get to see their heroes play a full match. The players would likely prefer to finish the match instead of losing momentum and then having to play on their ‘rest day’. But then on the flip side – after a match, it often takes a player a long time to fall asleep because of the warm-down routine, replenishing lost calories and worst of all, the adrenaline surging inside of you - so a 3.30am finish, probably means you wouldn’t fall asleep until 9am. This has already massively impacted your ‘rest day’.

So, what to do – if anything?

I think realistically these situations can only be chalked down to one of those nuances of elite level sport. It makes headlines.

But then, is this safe? Perhaps we should halt matches at midnight and resume them the next day, for the safety of the players. However – this would impact on the schedule of the next day, pushing the already scheduled matches back in time, leading to a potential repeat of the same situation and it happening all over again.

As we can see, it’s a very tricky situation. What would you do as either the tournament organiser / scheduler, or as the player?

When we look at the picture below, these finishing times are not really acceptable – because it shows, late night (or should I say, early morning) finishes are not a “one-off”, but in fact, almost a daily occurrence at major tennis events. I’d certainly be ‘slightly miffed’ (to say the least) if I was working at the venue on one of these evenings and wasn’t allowed home until the last crowd member, or the last player left the building.