Only a couple of weeks after criticising tennis’s “mental” schedule, British No1 Jack Draper retired from a match in Tokyo with what looked like an abdominal injury.
In all probability, the setback will force Draper into an early return from Asia, where he had been entered into next week’s Shanghai Masters.
After that, there are only a couple of indoor events left on his schedule for what has been a breakthrough year: Vienna, which starts in just under a month’s time, and the season-ending Paris Masters. Despite this disappointment, he has already climbed from No 62 in the world on Jan 1 to No 20 now, winning a first ATP title in Stuttgart along the way.
Draper was trailing France’s Ugo Humbert by a set and 2-1 when he clearly incurred some sort of physical issue. He did not wait long before walking up to the net for a downbeat handshake.
Until this moment, Draper had been proud of a strong fitness record this season. “A big part of it for me is my health, staying on court,” he said in New York at the start of this month, after beating Tomas Machac to move into the US Open quarter-finals.
“I’ve worked really hard physically in the last year and a half to get my body where it needs to be. We still have a lot of ups and downs but one of our main goals was to get to the point where the consistency of my practice is very high. It’s all coming together.”
However, Draper incurred extra stress by going straight from his deep run in New York to the Davis Cup in Manchester, which is where he made his comments about the schedule and suggested that “it’s going to be very hard for players of my age to achieve longevity any more”.
This is one of those periods – a familiar enough phenomenon in tennis – when a number of players start complaining about their workloads. This latest outpouring has perhaps been prompted by the expansion of several ATP Masters events into two-week tournaments.
In an extended message on X, former French Open finalist Stefanos Tsitsipas said on Saturday: “We’re on the edge of a tennis revolution, one driven by the players … With leaders like Novak Djokovic stepping in, the push for a more player-friendly schedule is gaining traction. We players know better than anyone what’s needed, and now we’re in a unique position to negotiate these changes.”
No sensible observer could doubt that there is too much tennis, nor that the sport’s warring fiefdoms make it difficult to coordinate the various strands.
However, some of the objectors tend to undermine their own arguments by squeezing multiple exhibitions into their schedules. In the middle of next month, Djokovic is to join Rafael Nadal, Carlos Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner, Daniil Medvedev and Holger Rune in Saudi Arabia for the unofficial “Six Kings Slam”.
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