The morning after Jannik Sinner romped to his second consecutive title in Australia and two days removed from when Madison Keys shocked two-time champ Aryna Sabalenka to claim her maiden grand slam, Tennis Australia boss Craig Tiley has reflected on this year’s tournament.
The Australian Open drew record numbers through the gates at Melbourne Park as a festival atmosphere permeated the area throughout the 15-day event.
Despite some stellar tennis being on show and 1.2 million fans flocking through the gates though, it didn’t exactly go off without any hitches as crowd behaviour came firmly under the microscope.
Australian Open boss Craig Tiley defends crowd behaviour at Melbourne Park
Danielle Collins infamously had a running battle with the crowd during her match against home favourite Destanee Aiva in the second round.
This culminated in the American blowing kisses and sarcastically thanking those in attendance for contributing to her “big fat pay cheque” as she continued to go back-and-forth with the booing fans right until the very end.
The awkward moment wasn’t the only time behaviour was called into question with Alexander Zverev condemning those in Rod Laver Arena who booed when Novak Djokovic retired from their semi-final due to injury.
“Please, guys, don’t boo a player when he goes out with injury,” Zverev said.
“I know that everybody paid for tickets and everybody wants to see, hopefully, a great five-set match and everything, but you got to understand: Novak Djokovic is somebody that has given the sport for the past 20 years absolutely everything of his life.”
Jack Draper described it as the “worst abuse he’d experienced” during his run to the fourth round, while a host of games were briefly interrupted by crowd members yelling out during serves and points.
On countless occasions, chair umpires had to address the minority and remind them to remain silent.
However, Tiley dismissed the furore around crowd behaviour when he declared that evictions from the precinct had been way down on previous years.
“We think that the crowd really behaved very well,” Tiley told Channel Nine’s Today show.
“We had fewer evictions than we’ve ever had before. There’s always going to be a very small minority, a tiny minority, that are going to be disruptive.
“We made it very clear if you are, we’re going to remove you from the precinct and we did that with some people.
“But it was a smaller number than we’d done before. So on the whole, we were pleased with how the crowd behaved.”
