How different would tennis Grand Slams be if men and women played the same number of sets, ponders Toni Bruce.
Like millions of viewers worldwide, I’ve spent the past two weeks glued to the Australian Open tennis tournament.
For all the enjoyment, this year’s event fuelled my increasing frustration at the gender inequality in Grand Slam tournaments, where men play to the best of five sets but women are limited to the best of three sets.
Part of the reason is historical, dating back to the late 1800s when Western doctors firmly believed that strenuous and prolonged physical exertion was undesirable for women who were subject to the “tyranny” of their “limited bodily capacities”. In 1921, a New Zealand columnist — while arguing that playing tennis together would help men see women as “pals rather than underlings”— opined that “a woman’s physique will not stand excessive strain.”
These beliefs have long been shown to be nonsense. But somehow gender discrimination endures in the highest profile and most-watched tennis events: the four Grand Slam tournaments of Wimbledon and the Australian, French and US Opens.
Given that Australian Ash Barty’s two-set win in the women’s final averaged twice as many viewers (3.9 million) as Spaniard Rafael Nadal’s five-hour, five-set marathon (1.6 million), you might ask whether the number of sets matters.
... Fans might have experienced something unforgettable. We never got this chance.
I argue that it does. For me, the three-set limit makes it almost impossible for women’s matches to make it into the unforgettable category. In sport, some games stay with us for years. Some become part of our individual and collective consciousness, like the Silver Ferns amazing, nail-biting 2019 World Cup win (which one netball fan told me she still watches once a week), or the nerve-wracking 2011 All Blacks Rugby World Cup victory.
Close matches in any sport, where everything is on the line, reveal what it means to be human. Many take us on an emotional rollercoaster ride, as our favourite team or player teeters on the brink of triumph or defeat. We ride the highs and the lows, the ebbs and flows, as the lead or momentum swings back and forth.
Tennis, perhaps more than most sports, takes us on that journey. Momentum can swing wildly. A player can be up four games to two, and only 16 points later have lost the set. The tension in a close match can be almost unbearable. Players’ characters, strengths and vulnerabilities are writ large.
For these reasons and many more, I love watching tennis.
Disappointingly, the current structure doesn’t do women any favours.
I’ve seen too many women’s games that had the potential to be unforgettable — two gripping sets with momentum in the process of shifting — that were cut short, ended abruptly before we, or the players, had the chance to fully settle into the match.
This year’s Australian Open women’s final was one of them. Top-ranked Barty took out a closely-contested first set. Her No.27-ranked opponent Danielle Collins fought back strongly in the second, leading 5-1, before Barty won a tense tie-break to triumph 6-3, 7-6, and become the first Australian woman in 44 years to win the Australian Open.
The pattern of a convincing first set win by one player followed by a much closer second set is quite common, especially when a lower-ranked player is up against one of the world’s best. In this year’s Australian Open, 22 women’s singles matches ended on a tie-break, and several featured two tie-breaks, all of which indicate closely-fought contests.
In many cases the losing player was on her way back after a short period of losing her way. All of these matches had the potential to be as memorable as some of the men’s five-setters.
But they weren’t because the rules deny women this opportunity.
If women played to five sets, Collins might have had time to build on her momentum, and fans might have experienced something unforgettable. We never got this chance.
It’s not like men’s matches often go to five sets. In Omar Chaudhuri’s extensive analysis of 6096 men’s tennis Grand Slam matches between 2001 and 2012, only 18.5% made it to five sets.
More importantly, if the men were limited to only three sets, the eventual winner would have lost an astounding 55 percent of the time.
If Nadal played to the women’s rules, he would have lost this year’s Australian Open final.
Instead, because he is a male, he was able to claw his way back from two sets down, winning the final three sets to become the first man to win 21 men’s Grand Slam singles titles. The scorecard in Melbourne reads 2-6, 6-7(5), 6-4, 6-4, 7-5. The momentum shifts and edge-of-the-seat moments were described by the commentators as breathtaking, bold, and dramatic from start to finish. As one said, “You can’t script this stuff.”
Nadal’s win also reflects Chaudhuri’s finding that the player who won the third and fourth sets — rather than the first two — was significantly more likely to win the match overall: a pattern reinforced by Aaron Gordon’s more recent analysis of 275 men’s five-set ATP World Tour and Davis Cup matches between 2006 and 2016.
If women played to men’s rules, Chaudhuri’s analysis suggests Collins would have had an 18 percent chance of coming back to win.
If men played to women’s rules, many male winners — including Andy Murray, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, as well as Nadal — would have been early-exit losers.
Yes, the men knew they were playing up to five sets, so the games might have taken a different trajectory, but the point is that some highly dramatic matches might never have been played.
Last year, Nadal and 2021 Australian Open winner, Novak Djokovic, spoke in favour of limiting men’s matches to three sets.
This would have the advantage of putting the women’s and men’s game on an equal footing - but I’d rather see women have the chance to play five sets, because these are the matches that etch themselves into our individual and collective consciousness.
They mark us emotionally, as we ride the wave of each point, pulled into the intensity of momentum shifts, points won or lost by millimetres and observing players pushed to the extremes of their emotional and physical capacities.
There’s nothing else like it.
