It started at 10.20pm and lasted well over five hours – the second-latest finish to a grand slam singles match in history.
Only Lleyton Hewitt – against Marcos Baghdatis at the Australian Open in the third round of 2008 – can claim to have finished later.
That night – famous and infamous in equal measure – finished at 4:34am, with Hewitt emerging triumphant from the five-set epic.
It should never have happened again. The decision to schedule the match second in Margaret Court Arena’s night session was the height of stupidity.
Thousands of Aussie fans were robbed of the chance to watch a truly sublime Australian Open clash.
This should have been prime time television. And after Murray spent four hours and 49 minutes on court in round one, surely organisers realised that there was – at the very least – a chance this match would be lengthy?
In the fourth set, Murray echoed exactly what everyone was thinking as he screamed: “Why are we playing at 3am?!”
The folly of it all grew to farcical extremes after Murray stretched things into a fifth set. It was after 3am. The game clock would soon pass the five-hour mark. And Murray – 35 years old, not that he played like it – wasn’t allowed to take a toilet break.
He had already used his single allocated break for the match. The umpire denied his request for mercy, for common sense.
“Do you know something? I respect the rules. It’s so disrespectful that the tournament has us out here until 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning and we we’re not allowed to go and take a piss. It’s a joke. You know it’s a joke. It’s disrespectful”, he told the chair umpire.
“It’s ridiculous,” he added.
‘What is that s**t!’: Kokkinakis explodes in all-time umpire stoush
