What About Tied Sets in Tennis?
Since we’re approaching the end of the US Open, which is the tournament that kept hammering nails into the coffin of Grand Slam tournaments, and of tennis as a whole, as an endurance sport for half a century before the policy was fully enforced at the highest level, and my interest in tennis is still pretty much gone because of it, it may be an appropriate moment to post another idea that goes in the opposite direction of this enforcement of tie-breaks. Because I can’t stand tie-breaks, especially when a player wins a match in one, whether it’s in the final possible set or not.
Of course, if the reason why tie-breaks were introduced was because players were serving better and making it harder to obtain breaks, on the one hand it means that such measures are even now far less necessary in women’s matches, where breaks remain very common. But, either way, a solution would be to implement measures to make it harder to serve that well, for example by raising the net, maybe just at that moment, since I’m sure that technology now allows for the net to be automatically raised when a player gets ready to serve and lowered again the moment the ball passes it. And fewer points being obtained because of serving well would make for more interesting matches anyway.
But, to stick to the scoring system, if the desired outcome was to prevent sets from extending indefinitely, then why not allow them to be tied? If the score in a set gets to 6-6, consider it tied and continue with the next one, and the match ends when one player leads by more sets than the number that are left before the maximum. And that would even apply for the final set, so you could even have a five-set match won by the player who won a single set, even the first one, if all of the others were tied. So the player who actually wins sets by breaking the other’s serve more will win, but the sets won’t be extended… Unless we do get in a situation where the score is tied before the final set and that set gets to 6-6, in which case please, please allow it to continue again until one player obtains a break and the other doesn’t and stop this madness with final set tie-breaks!
