"The choices aren’t easy to make": Roland Garros tournament director Mauresmo discusses lack of women's night matches

Roland Garros (French Open) tournament director Amelie Mauresmo spoke exclusively with Eurosport about the scheduling controversy which saw her get in trouble last year.

Last year Mauresmo also spoke about the topic noting that men's matches garner more interest which is a comment that didn't go down well with many on social media. One year later the controversy persists so she joined Eurosport to talk about it once more.

“Ons [Jabeur] is right. The fact that we’ve only had one women’s match at night here makes it quite different to the US Open and Australian Open. The choices aren’t easy to make and you have to take a lot of things into consideration. Tonight is the perfect match to promote women’s tennis and I look forward to these girls giving us a big show and a big fight. We definitely talked about it [having two night matches] and there was a debate around the men’s matches v women’s matches in the evening."

"There are a few things I wanted to avoid - I don’t think we can put five matches on Philippe-Chatrier in the whole day. So, it would mean we would have only two matches in the day and two in the evening for evening ticket holders which would start at six or seven o’clock. I don’t think the crowd will be in their seats at seven o’clock. In Paris, people leave their work pretty late so to have them seated at 7.30 in the stadium is quite a challenge, so we wanted to address that. If we put five matches for the day and night sessions, we don’t want to finish at three o’clock in the morning like what happens somewhere else. It’s not perfect or ideal but these are the two main reasons we don’t want to have two matches on the night sessions. We also always keep two women’s and two men’s matches on Chatrier which is very important to us.”

The first night shift match between Sabalenka and Stephens went down well with a pretty decent crowd.