'Don't have many options' - Australian Open boss Craig Tiley defends the scheduling after Andy Murray marathon

ByEurosport

Updated 20/01/2023 at 08:48 GMT

Andy Murray played the longest match in his career in his five-set win over Australia's Thanasi Kokkinakis on Thursday. However, he was not happy that the match was allowed to play on until the early hours of Friday morning and afterwards called the scheduling "a farce". Tennis Australia chief executive Craig Tiley has come out in defence of how the matches at the Grand Slam are organised.

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Tennis Australia chief executive Craig Tiley has defended the Australian Open's scheduling after Andy Murray’s five-set win over Thanasi Kokkinakis finished after 4am.

Murray’s second round match against the Australian began at 10:20pm local time in Melbourne and did not finish until the early hours of Friday morning.

The three-time Grand Slam champion fought back from two sets down to beat the Australian in an epic five hour and 45 minute contest which was the longest match of Murray's career.

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The former world No. 1 criticised the finish time of the match afterwards, calling it a “farce”, while Eurosport pundit John McEnroe believes it is “crazy” and “absurd” that there is no cut-off point.

Tiley said that scheduling of Grand Slams is “extremely difficult” but the late finish would be part of their annual review.

"There are so many variables that go into thinking about how you're going to make it work each day," he told Australian broadcaster Channel Nine on Friday.

"Over the last few days we have had extreme heat, we've had over five breaks of rain, we've had cold.

"It's Melbourne, but we don't often get those conditions in such a short period of time.

"Generally a women's match is about an hour-and-a-half, and a men's match a little over two-and-a-half hours.

"That's the majority of the length of matches, [and] you work your schedule around that.

"But you are always going to have an out of the box situation where like last night it goes extra long unexpectedly."

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Tiley added that the Australian Open schedulers follow a similar pattern to the other three Grand Slams with morning sessions starting at 11am and evening sessions from 7pm.

He said: "You would expect from 7pm to 12am [the evening session] in that five-hour window, you would get two matches.

"We also have to protect the matches. If you just put one match at night and there's an injury, you don't have anything for fans or broadcasters. At this point there is no need to alter the schedule.

"We always look at it when we do the debrief like we do every year, we've had long matches before, at this point we've got to fit the matches in in the 14 days so you don't have many options."

Murray was spotted back at Melbourne Park less than eight hours after the match.