Later on Tuesday, Belarusian player Ilya Ivashka used his Instagram page to highlight an email sent to all the players left in the UAE. The email said that \u201cThe ATP is potentially organising a charter flight on Thursday, March 5 from Muscat \u2026 The cost is \u20ac5,000 per person\u201d.<\/p>\n
This hugely expensive offer prompted an outcry from the players, although the ATP later blamed a miscommunication, saying that the charter was operated by a third party, and they were only passing on the information.<\/p>\n
However, one coach told Telegraph Sport that the ATP should take responsibility and cover the cost of extracting those stuck in Fujairah, a city of 120,000 people which stands 75 miles from Dubai across the Hajar Mountains.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt seems to me that the ATP are happy to treat players like employees when it suits them,\u201d said the coach. \u201cFor instance, if you don\u2019t turn up for a tournament you\u2019ve entered, you get fined. But then, when players need help in a situation like this, they go back to being sole traders who are supposed to sort themselves out. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s ethical.\u201d<\/p>\n
Later on Tuesday, the Professional Tennis Players\u2019 Association \u2013 the body founded by Novak Djokovic as a pressure group to force change within the sport \u2013 released a statement criticising the ATP for allowing the Fujairah Challenger to go ahead in the first place. In the same statement, the PTPA also offered to cover \u20ac2,500 of the charter fee through Muscat for each player, and challenged the ATP to do the same.<\/p>\n
As the PTPA statement put it: \u201cWe believe it is inappropriate for players to bear additional financial burdens resulting from circumstances beyond their control.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Frustrated players say that the ATP had confirmed that the first event would go ahead as recently as Sunday, even after initial reports of explosions in Dubai the previous day had circulated. The city has come under attack as part of Iran\u2019s retaliation against US strikes.<\/p>\n
One Briton \u2013 doubles specialist Fin Bass \u2013 has narrowly avoided travelling to Fujairah after his plane was delayed at Heathrow, but three others \u2013 Zach Stephens, Max Basing and Alastair Gray \u2013 all are stranded at the players\u2019 hotel with no immediate way out of the UAE.<\/p>\n
\u201cBeing stuck in a war zone is pretty unsettling especially when missiles are hitting oil rigs 15 kilometres from where the tournament is being played,\u201d Gray told Telegraph Sport. \u201cI\u2019m pretty surprised the tournaments even started.\u201d Gray also admitted that, while staying in Dubai on Saturday, a bomb had exploded just a couple of blocks from his hotel.<\/p>\n
Other players caught up in the confusion include the 2025 Wimbledon men\u2019s doubles champions: Essex\u2019s Henry Patten and Finland\u2019s Harri Heliovaara. These two were not playing in Fujairah but instead won the more prestigious Dubai Duty Free Championships on Saturday.<\/p>\n
Patten and Heliovaara are due to play at Indian Wells in California from this weekend. On Tuesday, they drove from Dubai to the border with Oman, hoping to catch a flight out of Muscat, but were delayed for so long by paperwork issues on the border that they lost any chance of catching that flight and had to drive back.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Patten\u2019s coach, Calvin Betton, is waiting for them in Indian Wells. As Betton told Telegraph Sport, \u201cThe crazy thing is that this tournament [Indian Wells] is run by one of the richest people in the world [Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison], and the DDF event is also run by incredibly wealthy people. Dubai\u2019s airspace is now open, and yet they can\u2019t find a jet to get people out. It\u2019s not just Harri and Henry, there are others stuck there as well.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Later on Tuesday, Belarusian player Ilya Ivashka used his Instagram page to highlight an email sent to all…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":456523,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[8627,429,164199,5386,217,101,5438,118,56,54,55,157732],"class_list":{"0":"post-456522","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-bahrain","9":"tag-dubai","10":"tag-iran-war","11":"tag-saudi-arabia","12":"tag-sport","13":"tag-sports","14":"tag-standard","15":"tag-tennis","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom","18":"tag-unitedkingdom","19":"tag-us-content"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=456522"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456522\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/456523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=456522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=456522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=456522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}