Andrea Petkovic has called for Grand Slams to make a big change after Mirra Andreeva’s victory over Marta Kostyuk at Roland Garros.
Andreeva beat Kostyuk 6-1, 6-3 in a match that lasted just 76 minutes, enabling the Russian teenager to reach her first Grand Slam final in Paris.
The 19-year-old now has a huge chance to win her first Grand Slam title, with Andreeva now the favourite to beat qualifier Maja Chwalinska in the final.
When reacting to Andreeva’s emphatic win over Kostyuk, former top 10 player Petkovic admitted that it made her want a rule to change, as she made a point about Joao Fonseca.
Andrea Petkovic wants women to play best-of-five after Marta Kostyuk’s loss to Mirra Andreeva
Alongside Coco Gauff’s former coach Brad Gilbert, Petkovic gave her reaction to Andreeva’s victory on The Big T Podcast.
Both Gilbert and Petkovic agreed that Kostyuk’s forehand was a big issue for her against Andreeva, claiming that it ‘really went off the rails’.
Petkovic then pointed out the difficulty of women playing best-of-three matches in the latter stages of majors, and how quickly it can run away from players like Kostyuk.
As a solution to this, Petkovic suggested that both men and women should play best-of-three for the first week, before switching to best-of-five in the second.
“I thought Marta tried to force things a little bit too much in very tricky conditions and when you play in windy conditions you have to play to big safe targets,” said Gilbert.
Petkovic added, “Her forehand is such an improved shot, but today it really went off the rails and sometimes that happens when an element comes into play, whether that is tiredness or as today, wind.
“Maybe for Marta it was both, because she played so many matches in this clay season, but her forehand kind of really went off the rails.”
Gilbert: “Play with some shape with the forehand. She kept kind of going bigger and it felt like that played into Andreeva’s hand and she just saw things happen really fast, all of a sudden I’m down 4-0.”
Petkovic then said, “I wish that we would have best-of-three in the first week for everybody and best-of-five for everybody in the second week, both men and women.
“The thing that happens in these big matches, and you saw it with Fonseca the other day [vs Jakub Mensik], he still had time to come back but he was so tired. In a women’s match, he is out after an hour and 10 minutes, it’s 2-6, 2-6, goodbye, see you in Brazil.
“In a best-of-five, he still had chances to come back in the third set, it was on the very edge for him to turn this match around. Women don’t have that luxury. Marta Kostyuk has a bad start, doesn’t like the wind and she’s down 0-6, 0-3 or 1-6, 0-3 and then of course the panic sets in.”
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While Gilbert was in favour of women playing best-of-five set matches, he did not want men to stop playing the longer format in the first week of Grand Slams.
“I’m okay with your suggestions about if they want to go to best-of-five, maybe the semis,” said Gilbert. “I’m not okay with men going best of three in the first week, because it takes away that element that we can have these great comebacks and it just also changes history. So I would rather we don’t change anything if we’re going to go [change] men at any point to best-of-three.”
When did women last play best-of-five set matches at a Grand Slam?
Although women have never played best-of-five set matches at Grand Slam tournaments in the Open Era, there was a time that they did.
At the US Open, which was then known as the U.S. National Championships, between 1891 and 1901, women would play best-of-five set matches in the Challenge Round.
The Challenge Round would feature the previous champion and the winner of the preliminary, and was won at the U.S. National Championships in 1901 by Elizabeth Moore, who beat defending champion Myrtle McAteer 6-4, 3-6, 7-5, 2-6, 6-2 in the last best-of-five set women’s match at a major tournament.
Women have played the longer format more recently at the WTA Finals, with the final of the year-end tournament featuring a best-of-five set match between 1984 and 1998.
The last of those saw Martina Hingis beat Lindsay Davenport 7-5, 6-4, 4-6, 6-2 to win her first WTA Finals title.
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Earlier this year, Australian Open tournament director Craig Tiley claimed he wanted women to play best-of-five set matches before he would leave his role to become the CEO of the USTA.
There has been a mixed reaction to this, with Aryna Sabalenka more in favour of it, while Gauff has suggested it could cause problems.
