ATP Finals: Exhausted stars, exhausting season: Little glamour at the Tennis World Championships

The first days in London have shown that there is a lot of mediocrity in the last few metres of a long season.

When Dominic Thiem had won a World Cup match in London on Thursday, against Kei Nishikori from Japan, the Austrian star was not really happy: “It wasn’t great,” Thiem said in a TV statement after the conciliatory final point of his activities. And then Thiem put an observation on record, which he certainly shared with many thousands of fans at the ATP Finals in the O2 Arena: “I haven’t seen a decent match here yet. One to remember.”

“Watch the ATP Finals in Germany now and be there live for only € 9,99 with the Sky Ticket until the end of December. Just cancel monthly.”

In fact, at the last tournament of the year, only the setting, the backdrop, the surroundings are big: Around 17,000 spectators make the pilgrimage to the afternoon and evening events over to North Greenwich, to the east of the English capital, but what they saw was not a roaring ball experience. At most, it’s average goods. And sometimes not even that. When the South African Kevin Anderson was also in the match against Kei Nishikori on Tuesday and was heading for a double-zero against the completely indisposed Japanese pro – he finally won 6:0, 6:1 – for the first time in years there were clear expressions of displeasure in the ranks, whistles were whistling through the arena.

None of the eight professionals has yet been able to shake off the burdens of a season that is once again exhausting. Nor are the two huge favorites on the title in London, Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer. Federer started the tournament with a disappointing defeat to Nishikori, but then came better and more determined into the match against Thiem and Anderson, so that he made it into the semi-finals as the first player of the group. But the Maestro himself admitted that the games had also been marked by “many mistakes”. Djokovic said after his victory against the German Zverev that the level of the match was “not really breathtaking”: “After such a long year you can simply be happy about the victory”.

Until Friday and the decision in the Guga Kuerten group, only one of the World Cup matches had been over three sets and thus the full distance. The great rest, however, was characterized by one-sidedness of numbers and monotony in the game. Zverev, the 21-year-old German, sent out a kind of call for help in the middle of the week: The tennis season is absurdly long, he said, “we play as long as no other sport, we have the shortest breaks.” He hit a nerve at least with many other top players, who traditionally have to play the most challenging matches over the eleven-month season. Federer, often something of a royalty-free Zverev advisor, said Thursday that many players were free to take more breaks. What is actually true, but only for deserved forces like him – according to the ATP regulations Federer has to play significantly fewer compulsory tournaments than the other tour caravan, he has also been taking these recovery intervals for quite some time.

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Some of the real top tennis players are not even at the start in London, the list of injured is long. Rafael Nadal is stricken again, Andy Murray and Stan Wawrinka have been out of action for quite some time. The Argentinian Juan Martin del Potro is also once again in patient status, and he could not enrich the World Cup celebrations either. But if the great power struggle over tournaments and dates is not resolved in a peaceful manner, then the hunt in the travelling circus will soon get even worse.

In the last few weeks alone, the Davis Cup final tournament in mid/end November and the ATP Cup, which has just been presented, are two new team events for the start of the 2020 season. A real break for physical recovery and regeneration between the seasons would no longer exist. In the 2020 season there would then be the ATP Cup, the Davis Cup, the Laver Cup show competition and the Olympic tennis tournament. Besides all the regular tournaments and the four Grand Slams. The tennis circuit, says a European tournament manager, “is about to destroy itself.”