Tournament director Amelie Mauresmo, herself a former women’s world number one, had regularly pointed to the possibility of short two-set matches as the reason for often overlooking the women.<\/p>\n
“The match-ups are always interesting for both men and women, but there are multiple factors for us to make the choice,” Mauresmo said earlier on Monday. <\/p>\n
“As you know, the potential length of the matches is something that we are also looking at.”<\/p>\n
On picking Sabalenka against Osaka, she added: “It was obvious that it should be a night match tonight.”<\/p>\n
There was a school of thought that Mauresmo might have looked elsewhere, though, had men’s world number one Jannik Sinner still been in the tournament.<\/p>\n
Sinner would have been scheduled to play on the same day, but without him the men’s matches taking place on Monday lacked star power.<\/p>\n
If Sabalenka against Osaka did not take place under the lights, then which women’s match would conceivably ever be picked?<\/p>\n
With that came a sense of expectation.<\/p>\n
If the match ended up being a dud, then it could have been used by critics as a stick to beat the women’s game with.<\/p>\n
That, others argue, was a situation created by the French Open’s reluctance to showcase its female stars in the first place.<\/p>\n
Was the burden which it placed on Sabalenka and Osaka to represent the women’s game fair?<\/p>\n
“I don’t really care. There are so many different things to put pressure on myself – that was the last thing on my mind,” said Osaka.<\/p>\n
“Shout out to the tournament for trusting us – I hope it was entertaining for people.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tournament director Amelie Mauresmo, herself a former women’s world number one, had regularly pointed to the possibility of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":618098,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-618097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618097","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=618097"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618097\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/618098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}