Andy Murray has taken to social media to criticise the scheduling at the US Open, branding the situation a ‘total mess’. The 37-year-old is watching the action from home after retiring from tennis at the Olympics, where he represented Team GB in the men’s doubles alongside Dan Evans.
Murray was awake in the early hours of Monday morning to watch Frances Tiafoe beat Alexei Popyrin in four gruelling sets. Qinwen Zheng was also in action, securing a hard-fought victory over Donna Vekic to reach the quarter-finals at Flushing Meadows.
The Croatian’s match finished at 2.15am – an unwanted new record for the tournament.
Taking to X, formerly Twitter, Murray urged the Grand Slam’s chiefs to address the schedule with some matches starting in the middle of the night and not finishing until the following morning.
“The tennis scheduling situation is a total mess,” wrote Murray, alongside a thumbs down emoji. “It looks so amateurish having matches going on at 2,3 4am. Sort it out.”
It came after US Open bosses appeared to ignore their own policy on late-night matches, with Aryna Sabalenka and Ekaterina Alexandrova breaking the record for the latest ever start time on Friday. They began their match at eight minutes past midnight and did not finish until nearly 2am.
In a press conference before the tournament, US Open director Stacey Allaster confirmed plans for referees to be given the option to move court assignments for any matches that had not started by 11.15pm.
“We’ve had late matches here, we will still have late matches here,” said Allaster. “We are now defining a policy.
“In the event that we have the second match of the evening in Ashe or the last match in Armstrong, if those matches have not gone on by 11.15pm, the referee will have the discretion to move the match. That’s going to depend on many variables, like do we have the broadcast team ready, do we have a ball crew, so forth.”
Sabalenka later revealed that the players did get the option of moving onto Grandstand but decided to see what happened in the fourth set of Novak Djokovic’s third-round defeat to Popyrin.
“They asked us for our opinion,” explained Sabalenka. “They were keeping the staff on the Grandstand so we would have the possibility to move, but there was also a chance of rain. It was tricky, so we were waiting to see how the fourth set [of Djokovic’s match went].”
