Best-of-five is a scheduling problem before it is a fitness one

The argument about long matches is really an argument about how many hours a television window can hold.

Defenders of best-of-five say it separates the great from the merely very good, because holding technique together in the fifth hour is a genuine test. Critics say it is an anachronism that damages bodies and produces dead tennis. Both are arguing about the players, and the pressure that will actually decide it comes from the schedule.

A five-set format makes match length unpredictable in a way that no other major sport tolerates. A first-round encounter can last two hours or five and a half, which means the following match on that court starts at an unknown time, which means the broadcaster cannot promise a window, the crowd on the second ticket session cannot plan, and the player waiting to go on has spent six hours in a locker room warming up twice.

That unpredictability is the real cost, and it lands hardest on the people with the least power: the low-ranked player scheduled fourth on an outside court, going on at nine at night, playing until one in the morning, and then being asked to play again in thirty-six hours.

The physiological argument is genuinely two-sided. Long matches are a real test of durability, and durability is a legitimate sporting quality; I do not want a sport where nothing is allowed to hurt. But recovery from a five-hour match is not complete in a day, and a draw structure that produces one on Tuesday and expects another on Thursday is not testing durability. It is testing luck of the draw.

The compromises usually floated are final-set tiebreaks, which are already in, and shortening early rounds to three sets while keeping five for the later ones. That second option is the one I would take, and the objection to it is aesthetic rather than practical: it makes the tournament two different competitions. It already is. A first-round match on court seventeen and a semi-final are not the same event and pretending otherwise is sentiment.

Here is the test that settles it for me. If best-of-five is so obviously the superior format, it would have been adopted for the women's draw at the majors long ago rather than repeatedly discussed and shelved.

The reason it has not been is not physiology. It is that nobody can find the hours.