Iga Swiatek is the latest elite-level female player to give her opinion on whether women should play best-of-five-set tennis.
It is a debate that continues to rage on, no matter how many of the WTA Tour’s stars shoot it down.
There will still always be a higher-up official who keeps pushing the argument.
Well, whilst Iga Swiatek was not completely dismissive, she did raise some concerns.
Should women play best-of-five sets at Grand Slams?
However, the former world number one also explained why she felt she would be handed a huge advantage over her competitors, were this change to come to fruition.
Iga Swiatek thinks she’d have an advantage if women played best-of-five-set matches
Asked at her Qatar Open press conference whether she’d like to see women play best-of-five matches at Grand Slams, just after Coco Gauff had shared her verdict, Swiatek then added: “I think with the world right now that is kind of, like, speeding up, I don’t really think it makes sense for us to play such long matches. Especially when I think it would be tough to keep the quality up throughout the whole match.
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“But if you ask specifically to my game, I consider myself one of the players that is like kind of tough in coping with endurance and longer matches. I think maybe I would have some advantage.
“Honestly, I’ve never played such a long match, so I have no idea how my body would react. I think also the whole season would change, because we would need to plan everything differently and prepare for these long, long matches. There would, for sure, be many, many more questions about the scheduling then.”
When was the last time women played best-of-five-set matches?
The last time that a professional five-set tennis match was played on the women’s tour was nearly 28 years ago now.
And, it was an initiative that lasted for quite some time, with the final of the WTA Finals being played over a best-of-five-set match for 14 years.
Starting in 1984 and concluding in 1998, the very last match played in this format saw Lindsay Davenport face Martina Hingis.
The latter took the win across four fiercely competitive sets, and when they faced each other again at the same stage a year later, it was the American who came out on top in a three-set match.
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