A leading athlete welfare and injury prevention expert has broken down the challenges and risks that night session matches at the Australian Open present to players after Daniil Medvedev called for change.<\/p>\n
At the Australian Open<\/a>, the night session on Rod Laver Arena and Margaret Court Arena \u2014 the two most prominent courts \u2014 is scheduled to begin at 7pm each day.<\/p>\n Two night session matches are scheduled on each of these courts per day, with the lineup usually consisting of one women\u2019s singles match and one men\u2019s singles match.<\/p>\n The men\u2019s match is often the second and final match of the night session, and given the best-of-five set format of men\u2019s Grand Slam tennis, this has led to some extremely late finishes in Melbourne over the years.<\/p>\n The latest-ever Australian Open match finish was in 2008, with Lleyton Hewitt overcoming Marcos Baghdatis in a five-set third round contest at 4:34am \u2014 the second-latest finish time in tennis history<\/a>.<\/p>\n Medvedev, a three-time Australian Open finalist, has been involved in some early morning Melbourne marathons, having beaten Emil Ruusuvuori at 3:40am in 2024 and lost to Learner Tien at 2:54am at last year\u2019s event.<\/p>\n Earlier this month, Medvedev called for the night session on the two premier courts to start an hour earlier<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not against playing at night, don\u2019t get me wrong, but starting the first match at 7pm is just asking for trouble,\u201d said the former world No 1 and US Open champion.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you have one match of five sets, and both of them went for five for me, it is a bit too late to start at 7pm. They should be starting at 6pm.\u201d<\/p>\n Stephen Smith, the founder and CEO of Kitman Labs \u2014 the world\u2019s leading sports science and performance intelligence company \u2014 spoke exclusively to Tennis365 about the issues with playing tennis in the early hours of the morning.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you bear in mind their biological and circadian rhythms, having somebody try to have peak performance at a time when their body is normally used to being asleep\u2026 remember that these guys are extremely high-level athletes that are in bed earlier, promoting recovery and resting,\u201d Smith began.<\/p>\n \u201cThe fact is that this is probably a bigger change for them than a normal human that might stay up a little bit later.<\/p>\n Emma Raducanu told why the Australian Open will be \u2018very challenging\u2019 by leading injury expert<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Former world No 2 predicts dominance of Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner will end in 2026<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Want more from Tennis365? Add us as a preferred source on Google to your favourites list<\/a> for tennis coverage you can trust.<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cI think the toll on their body, the change for them in terms of their planning and preparation as well, because they\u2019re not just going to walk into that without having prepared and planned for that, they\u2019re going to have tried to adjust their body clock and schedule to get themselves ready for that.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd that itself puts even more pressure and stress on these guys going into a tournament like this. And if they\u2019re not planning and prepping like that, they\u2019re putting themselves at risk of fatigue, et cetera.<\/p>\n \u201cDecreases in coordination, decreases in motor control, reaction times \u2014 all of those things would potentially increase the likelihood of injury, or a decrease in performance, which is probably just as important. Obviously they\u2019re going to the tournament to win.\u201d<\/p>\n Smith also addressed whether there should be a limit as to how late matches can start, and also a cut-off time for play.<\/p>\n \u201cListen, it\u2019s being done for TV purposes, right? And they\u2019re trying to find the right balance from a fan engagement perspective,\u201d Smith said.<\/p>\n \u201cI think what we\u2019d want to do was study some of the output and data coming from those matches and understand, are there changes in performance, or do we see differences in the types of results or outputs that come from those matches?<\/p>\n \u201cIs the product that we\u2019re getting in those night matches just as good as the product we\u2019re getting in day matches? If the answer to that question is no, then I think you probably look at changing it. What we want is as good a competition as possible.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd the other thing we\u2019d want to look at is the number of injuries that result from that, or the number of players involved in those night matches that end up subsequently getting injured for the rest of the tournament. That would start to tell us about the knock-on impact of those night matches from a health perspective or a performance perspective.<\/p>\n \u201cSo I probably wouldn\u2019t jump into saying we should stop them or there should be an exact time. I\u2019d turn to the data and ask some better questions of it.\u201d<\/p>\n READ NEXT: Rafael Nadal to make Australian Open return for special event on day of men\u2019s final<\/a> The post Leading expert reveals risks of Australian Open night matches after Daniil Medvedev\u2019s call for change<\/a> appeared first on Tennis365<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A leading athlete welfare and injury prevention expert has broken down the challenges and risks that night session matches at the Australian Open present to players after Daniil Medvedev called for change. At the Australian Open, the night session on Rod Laver Arena and Margaret Court Arena \u2014 the two most prominent courts \u2014 is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tennisring.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tennisring.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tennisring.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tennisring.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tennisring.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tennisring.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tennisring.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tennisring.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tennisring.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Exclusive Interviews<\/h2>\n
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