The absurdity of tennis players’ toilet breaks

Forgive the personal question, but how long does it take you to, you know, go to the gents, ladies, non-binary? Quite what Stefanos Tsitsipas was doing in there in any of his numerous toilet breaks during the epic first-round US Open encounter with Andy Murray at Flushing (geddit?) Meadows is anybody’s guess. It clearly riled Murray — never the hardest thing to do — who was playing as well as ever, and is the ironman, quite literally, of Grand Slam tennis. He has also rather wittily pointed out that Jeff Bezos can get into space and back again more quickly than Tsitsipas can go to the loo.

There is something pleasingly humdrum about the world no. 3 grabbing a paper from his bag and wandering off to the gents. Who hasn’t done that at work? But as the match with Murray must surely count as a ‘meeting’, nipping off for a ‘comfort break’ is downright rude.

This chaos (to put it kindly — Murray called it ‘cheating’) should be stopped: point penalties after a certain time, for example.

Cricket needs a change of mindset. The real problem with the current atomisation of the game is that it has pigeonholed a lot of players into white-ball specialists, and red-ball cricketers. The best players can play all forms of the game: why should someone not score runs for Birmingham Phoenix on a Sunday and then start a Test on Thursday? There are too many teams to play for in too many leagues, and, besides, how many badges can one player kiss in a calendar year?

Players seem to regard Test cricket as the pinnacle.