The match ended at 3.33am, on a Shelton service winner at 235 km/h. Four hours and twenty-eight minutes of play, a fifth set settled in a 10/7 tie-break, and a record: no match had ever finished that late at the US Open.
I spent the day looking for the rule that explains how you are supposed to behave in the stands at that hour. The silence between first and second serve, I’m told it’s tradition. Fine. But at 3.20am, is that still collective silence, or just a stadium with no energy left to make noise? Nobody could tell me whether the rule changes with the clock. I checked, and actually nobody knows.
Silly question, but: is there an hour after which a spectator is officially allowed to go home without it counting as disrespect? I asked three people and was told the situation had never come up. It came up that night. Anyway, I still have a lot to learn.
Shelton summed up his night like this: “I’m tired. It was a battle, an epic match, really gruelling.” Alcaraz said he was “really tired” after the third set before he “found a way to pull himself together.” So both men had the same information at the same moment. They just kept playing.
On Tuesday, Andrew Abdo, who runs the Australian Open, argued for a rethink of the format: “Maybe in the future the Grand Slams will use different formats depending on the round or the length of matches. Maybe we won’t always play best of five, or the scoring system could change.” I note that the idea is to change the scoring rather than the start time, which is a choice.
The latest match in the tournament’s history. In my day, the latest match was the one you finished at dusk, because after that you couldn’t see the ball. I’m not criticising. I’m comparing.
Shelton plays Frances Tiafoe in the semi-final. The previous quarter-final also went past four and a half hours, Tiafoe beating Alex Michelsen in a super tie-break. And at 23, Shelton has his first career win over a top-3 player, after losing his first seventeen meetings with that group and taking a single set in the process. Silly question, but: did anyone let him sleep before asking him how he felt?
It’s true, we checked: La Libre.
