The US Open is shifting its blended doubles occasion every week earlier than the event begins, hoping a revamped format and a $1 million prize will persuade high singles gamers to chase a Grand Slam doubles title.
This 12 months’s occasion – dwell on Sky Sports activities – will characteristic 16 groups competing over two days in shorter matches.
Event organisers imagine that may appeal to the game’s greatest stars, a lot of whom have lengthy handed on doubles to maintain themselves contemporary for singles.
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The plan requires blended doubles to be contested on August 19-20, in the course of the week when the qualifying rounds for males’s and girls’s singles are being held with the principle attract singles starting on August 24.
“What I’d say is the rationale behind that is to attraction to extra followers and develop the fan base all over the world,” stated Lew Sherr, govt director and CEO of the US Tennis Affiliation. “However the way in which to do this is to have the most important names within the sport taking part in doubles, and to showcase them teaming up and taking part in in a special format, we predict is thrilling. In actual fact, we all know it is thrilling.”
The early spherical matches can be best-of-three units performed to only 4 video games, with a deciding level performed at deuce.
Tie-breakers can be at 4-4 – reasonably than 6-6 in a daily match – and a 10-point match tie-breaker can be performed if the groups break up units, reasonably than a 3rd set.
Solely the ultimate will intently resemble a Grand Slam match, a best-of-three units performed to 6 video games with no-ad scoring, tie-breakers at 6-6 and a 10-point match tie-breaker.
Eight groups will earn direct entry by their mixed singles rankings, with eight different groups given wild playing cards into the sphere.
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There’s a concern the brand new occasion will squeeze out doubles specialists who depend on Grand Slam paycheques and now lose entry to one in every of them.
To compensate for that, Sherr stated the prize cash that was allotted to the 32-team blended doubles event ultimately 12 months’s US Open can be redirected towards males’s and girls’s doubles.
“Sure, there’s some that can be dissatisfied that they will not have the chance to compete on this occasion,” Sherr stated.
“On the opposite aspect, we all know that there is a enormous alternative to create extra curiosity globally in doubles and there could also be a cascading impact right here, that the blended creates a much bigger highlight on the lads’s and girls’s doubles once we get into that portion of the event.
“We’ll should see how that performs out, however we do know that our blended competitors traditionally has been competing with the lads’s and girls’s singles, and so the fields have suffered and the eye has suffered. This can be a probability to offer it an enormous highlight over two nights.”
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