The greatest challenge for Carlos Alcaraz in his third-round match at the Cincinnati Open on Friday was simply remaining sane. Before Alcaraz and Hamad Medjedovic, his opponent, took to the court, they had no choice but to wait as Francisco Comesaña and the big-serving Reilly Opelka worked through a tumultuous three-hour, three-set contest replete with manic momentum shifts, medical time-outs and a last-minute rain delay for good measure. Alcaraz and Medjedovic had no idea when their match would begin, yet a large part of their job is making sure they are always ready.
A few hours later, after closing out a straightforward victory, Alcaraz chuckled bitterly from a quiet hallway inside centre court as he reflected on his hours of preparation, which turned out to be more stressful than the match itself. “Well, it sucks,” he said, smiling. “Having to warm up three, four times, it’s horrible. A horrible thing. I thought having Opelka in front of me was going to be a little bit faster. I didn’t expect a three-hour match.”
His experience was reflective of one of the unique challenges of tennis. Aside from at the start of a day or session, matches usually have no fixed start time. In order to be successful, players must remain focused through this uncertainty.
Karen Khachanov, the men’s world No 12, says: “We can go in all sports: NHL, American football or soccer. They know the whole season when they start – which game, against who and where. In tennis, this is the toughest part. You need to adapt to the circumstances.”
The unique nature of the scoring system makes things even more challenging. A match can completely flip at any time and a player can come within a point of winning a match yet still be on court hours later. Almost every player can instantly think of an occasion when the match directly before theirs significantly frustrated them.
For Iga Swiatek, her 2023 French Open semi-final against Beatriz Haddad Maia is seared in her mind by the psychodrama between Karolina Muchova and Aryna Sabalenka immediately before them. “Aryna had 5-2 and then lost in the third set, so I was warming up like seven times, literally,” Swiatek says.
“It was a rollercoaster of emotions, from being stressed, to really not giving a damn what’s going to happen in the match before, and then warming up again, being hyped up, and then being sleepy.”
Being stuck behind a dramatic and seemingly endless five-set match at a grand slam tournament is even more aggravating. Madison Keys instantly recalls a difficult situation one year at the US Open. “I was third on, but I followed two men’s matches, they both went five sets and I went on after the night session [had begun]. And it was in that moment that I decided that we should ban five sets,” she says, laughing. Jessica Pegula, the women’s world No 4, concurs: “If you’re in a grand slam and you follow a three-out-of-five-set match, and they go five, you’re screwed.”
Every player aims to start their match with their energy high and adrenaline pumping, but that is not always possible after so many false starts. “It’s tough to wake yourself up again,” says Khachanov. “Let’s say you warmed up, you are full of adrenaline, you are ready to go on court, and then all of a sudden, there’s another set. So you are thinking: ‘OK, should I eat now? Should I just sleep? Should I watch the phone or I just, I don’t know, look at the roof? What do I do? Play cards with my team?’ Sometimes you just don’t really know what to do.”
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The first truly significant match of Emma Raducanu’s career, during her breakout debut run at Wimbledon in 2021, showed exactly what this situation can do to a player. As an 18-year-old Raducanu and Ajla Tomljanovic waited for Alexander Zverev’s five-set match against Félix Auger-Aliassime to finish on No 1 Court, the Briton became increasingly anxious. Overwhelmed by her nerves, she took an off-court medical time-out in the second set of her fourth-round match because of breathing difficulties and had an apparent panic attack. She never came back. “I had a little episode on the court,” she says. “It was new to me as well. I had no idea what was going on. I think I had way too much coffee before that match as well. That was just an experience. I was so wired from the start of my day.”
Raducanu finds it far easier to be scheduled as the first match of the day, so she does not have to worry about the start time. Not everyone agrees, Daniil Medvedev for one. The Russian says: “I was talking to my team today. I was like: ‘When I’m 35, I might just boycott the 11am matches. I’ll be like: “I’m not coming. Walkover.” Like: ‘Yeah, I didn’t wake up. Sorry, guys.’ In my opinion, 11 is so early. You have to wake up at 6.30 in the morning, where, if you play at night, you wake up at 9am. So it changes the perspective of the match. It’s crazy mentally.”
In player lounges, locker rooms and warm-up areas around the world, each player copes with delayed starts in different ways. Depending on how he is feeling, Alcaraz can be found playing football, cards or napping. Andrey Rublev is always sleeping so he relies on his coach to provide him updates on the match before. And then there is Coco Gauff, who says with a laugh: “I’m usually just on TikTok.”
Others, such as Naomi Osaka and Keys, quickly find themselves immersed in the match before them. The latter says: “I think we’re kind of all just watching the score and just being like: ‘Oh, come on!’ Because a lot of times, especially if you’re not on a main court, you can’t actually see the match, so you’re just waiting and staring at the score to flip. And you’re living and dying [by the live scores]. All of a sudden you’re cheering for one person that you’ve never met … and then cheering for the other person.”
There are even times when players find themselves watching a match with their next opponent. One memorable example came at the Australian Open in 2016 when Roger Federer and Grigor Dimitrov sat side-by-side in the warm-up gym and watched Lauren Davis prolong their day by dragging Maria Sharapova into a final set. Amusingly, Federer spent much of the second set tie-break screaming at the top of his lungs both due to his anguish at his match being delayed and his enjoyment of the contest.
According to Dimitrov, who laughs fondly at this memory, taking in the preceding match with his opponent used to be common on the tour. “I think it happened often,” he says. “Not so much any more, to be honest. Early on, the guys around my age were doing that. We’re OK with it. Now it’s a little bit different.”
The uncertainty of the schedule can cause more serious problems, such as the ludicrous, unhealthy late finishes that have become commonplace in the sport. Andy Murray’s 4.05am win over Thanasi Kokkinakis at the 2023 Australian Open, for example, was simultaneously an incredible sporting achievement and a complete farce. The men’s Association of Tennis Professionals and the Women’s Tennis Association have since initiated a new policy regarding late matches that, among many things, rules no match should begin after 11pm unless it receives special approval.
For the most part, however, this is just an annoying, unique challenge for players to overcome, another reason why this is such a complex and interesting sport. Alcaraz says, shrugging: “It is what it is. We have to get used to it. If I have to warm up two, three times, I’ll do it just to start the match in the best possible shape.”
After so many years on the tour, Keys has come to a similar conclusion: “It’s really just about trying to stay focused. It’s really hard, but you just have to try to manage your energy, eat as much as you can, warm up 37 times and just [remember] it’s happening to the other person, too. That’s all that you can do.”
