Doubles tennis is on the brink and needs to change fast

While Murray may be accurately reflecting a wider sense of gloom, ATP representatives insist that they have not given up on doubles: far from it. Indeed, Ross Hutchins – who is not only their head of product but also Murray’s former Davis Cup doubles partner – has been working on a review since the start of last season.

“Doubles is a very popular social sport and we feel there’s an opportunity to enhance its connection to the professional game,” Hutchins told Telegraph Sport last week. “We want to elevate it as a product for fans. It represents approximately 20 per cent of the on-site player compensation in our sport, and we want to generate more value from it by making some key changes.”

Before we get to the changes themselves, it is worth zooming out for a moment and explaining some of the problems. Many hardcore tennis fans are also recreational doubles enthusiasts, who find it difficult to understand why it fails to cut through. But there is an odd fish-nor-fowl quality to marketing doubles: it is neither a contest to find the best player in the world, nor a tribal team sport (except in representative events such as the Davis Cup, where the format shines brightest).

A vicious circle

Doubles events allow the grand slams and Masters tournaments to run more active courts simultaneously: a crucial asset when the Australian Open is welcoming 80,000 fans a day. But it can be a little like the relays at the Olympics: even the most invested spectators struggle to remember who won.

So what is to be done? Murray’s contention is that doubles has entered a sort of death spiral. Limited promotion leads to diminished relevance and less recognisability. Schedulers – whether for television or the events themselves – then start tucking doubles out of sight, and the vicious circle starts again.

Hutchins is less pessimistic, but he agrees that this loop needs to be broken and has a couple of ideas. One is to speed the game up. If a tournament knows that a match will not balloon to two-and-a-half hours – and thus ruin the timings for the ensuing singles contests – it will be more likely to schedule doubles on a big show court.

To explore this point further, there will be a trial, probably beginning in Madrid in May, with no pauses at changeovers (doubles is rarely aerobic in any case) and an accelerated shot-clock to stop those lengthy tactical debates (the ones where the players hide their lips behind a ball) at the back of the court.

The other priority is to get more singles players involved. Not only do the big names sprinkle extra stardust, but they also set up an intriguing narrative: who wins when the specialists play the world’s elite ball-strikers?

You can see the argument here. But the logistics are horribly complicated. Indian Wells is lucky, because it falls in a nice part of the calendar, when everyone is planning to move on to another big hard-court event in Miami afterwards.

But Miami, by contrast, is the last stop before the tour switches onto clay. Any singles player who loses early wants to fly straight out and get practising on the red stuff.

This is why the singles stars do not enter the doubles in Miami. Or if they do, they will probably play one match to get an early sighter of the local conditions, then pull out or tank their next round.

Last week’s Phoenix Challenger delivered a similar scenario. In a 16-team draw, only one quarter-final was played. The other three served up walkovers, because the singles players who won their first round (including Fabio Fognini, Thanasi Kokkinakis and Roman Safiullin) had other priorities.

“One of the issues is that the prize-money discrepancy is so big,” Murray told Telegraph Sport. “Everyone’s earning more money than they used to, which is great. But when a singles title is worth six figures, it’s difficult to make players commit the same amount of effort to a doubles event where a match might be worth £10,000.

“That’s why you want to keep the doubles matches to like an hour, an hour and 15 minutes. And to play doubles finals on a Thursday, giving these guys a couple of extra days to prepare for the next event. I’d sign up for that in a heartbeat.”