MADRID — Even for Spain, it was late, which is saying something in a nocturnal nation where a 10 p.m. dinner is nothing unusual.
In fact, it was so late that you could argue it was early when the American doubles team of Jack Sock and Sam Querrey finally finished off the Italians Simone Bolelli and Fabio Fognini.
The last shot, a Querrey ace, came at 4:04 a.m. on Thursday.
“At least it was prime time in the United States,” Querrey said, seeing the lighter side of it all much later in the day.
There was plenty to chuckle about during the match, as well. The absurdity of playing a professional tennis match at such an hour was not lost on the participants.
“We were laughing about it a little bit,” Querrey said. “Even after we split sets, we kind of all said to ourselves, ‘There’s not a big difference between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m.’”
On they dueled, and when it ended there were still about 150 people in attendance: a mixture of officials, team members and die-hard spectators.
What made the situation less amusing was that the preposterously late finish was the latest of several signs that the organizers of these new-look Davis Cup Finals have not had their hands firmly on the tiller.
In just four days, there have been plenty of own goals and unforced errors by those in charge, plenty of evidence that the essentials have not been weighed and measured with sufficient care.
If you are going to radically overhaul a 119-year-old competition in the name of innovation and in hopes of catering to modern attention spans, best to make the new version easy to follow and comprehend.
Clunky websites and apps are only part of the problem for fans and observers. With 18 teams divided into six groups of three, the six group winners advanced to the quarterfinals along with the two best second-place teams: Russia and Argentina. But the second-place tiebreakers caused plenty of confusion, and not just for fans.
Querrey and Sock took to the court (at 1:25 a.m.) thinking the United States still had a chance to advance if it defeated Italy. The score between the two countries was tied, 1-1, at that stage, but the U.S. actually had already been mathematically eliminated from the knockout rounds when Reilly Opelka lost the opening singles match to Fognini.
“Maybe midway through the match, some of the guys on our team realized we couldn’t get through, but we were not aware,” Querrey said. “It felt amazing to win it. Even though in the big picture it didn’t mean a whole lot, it’s still just the pride of winning and finishing second in the group and beating a great team like Italy.”
The early-morning ending was somewhat predictable: Putting back-to-back team matches in the same stadium with a 6 p.m. start for an evening session was asking for late-night trouble. After Spain-Russia finished at close to 2 a.m. on Wednesday, the Americans and Italians got even closer to breakfast.
“Starting times is one of the first things that I’m sure we’ll look at when we come together as captains and nations and look at this after the competition,” said Mardy Fish, the United States captain.
The organizers later made it clear that they had gotten the message, moving up starting times by half an hour for the Friday, Saturday and Sunday knockout-round matches. They also cut the time between singles matches to 10 minutes instead of 20.
But more significant reconstruction will probably be required when the investment firm Kosmos and the International Tennis Federation, which partnered to produce the overhauled event, sift through the pros and cons of these finals.
Bleary-eyed or not, Querrey still thinks Davis Cup has “great potential,” which is a point of view worth valuing for those, like me, who are feeling nostalgic about the traditional home-and-away format after seeing too many empty seats this week.
“That was always going to be the toughest part about it,” said Querrey, 32. “Having it here, there would be a lot for the Spaniards, and it would be a little weak for other countries. But people I think are going to learn about the event. I think even my friends and family still didn’t quite understand it, because it’s the first year. And maybe as it gets more talked about, people will understand more what it is and how great it could be.”
The event will need much better exposure and promotion to gain any traction in the United States. But Querrey thinks it needs to be even faster-paced, as well.
“I would be in favor of singles and doubles all going to two-of-three sets with no-ad scoring and a match tiebreaker for the third set,” he said. “I’m usually in favor of quicker, shorter matches and providing a little more excitement.”
That may be a tough sell, but the organizers are going to have to change or shorten something if they plan to stick with 18 teams over a single week next year. Perhaps better to reduce it to 16 teams with four groups of four and scrap the two wild cards.
In the meantime, everyone will have to make the best of the current format and its quirks, like the U.S.-Italy showdown. Records are incomplete, but Thursday’s finish is believed to be the second-latest in the Open era. The latest was Lleyton Hewitt’s third-round victory over Marcos Baghdatis at the 2008 Australian Open, which ended at 4:34 a.m.
Hewitt, now Australia’s Davis Cup captain in Madrid, remembers it well, and he is not alone. I covered that one, too, catching the sunrise on the way back to the hotel in Melbourne after the match.
I beat the sunrise on Thursday, and so did Querrey, who made it to bed around 6 a.m. and woke up in time for “breakfast” at 1 p.m.
“Definitely less than ideal to finish at 4 a.m.,” Querrey said. “But I’ll remember it.”
It was one for the record books, no doubt, but this is not the sort of record-setting Davis Cup leaders should be aiming for as they try to fix all the bugs and get their revamped event running much more smoothly.
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At Davis Cup, a Memorable Night (Plus Morning) Exposes Some Flaws - The New York Times
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