Elena Rybakina wasn't happy with the way the scheduling at the Canadian Open in Montreal impacted her play, and her comments were backed by Rennae Stubbs.
The Australian former WTA player follows tennis daily as part of her job as a tennis analyst and she was well aware of everything going on in Montreal. The weather wasn't the best, and it didn't leave the organizers many options, but she feels that they could have done a better job overall.
Rybakina herself wasn't happy with the way the event was run, calling it out following her loss to Liudmila Samsonova. She saw her previous match finish at 3 am, which wrecked her rhythm completely, even though she had more than 24 hours to recover after it.
It’s the first time when the match went that long and we finished also so late. It’s the first time and hopefully the last time because I think it’s been a little bit unprofessional from the, I cannot say really the tournament because I think that the most important is the WTA here, and the leadership is a little bit weak for now.
There are various ways you could potentially tackle these situations, from having rules in place to some other measures. You can't control the weather, however, Stubbs pointed out as a former player that most players would rather play two matches in a day than finish that late and compromise their recovery.
Rybakina's comments were echoed by Liudmila Samsonova as well as the Russian wasn't too pleased with the way things went either. There was no perfect resolution for the situation, but they could have done it better.
This shouldn’t happen! I know the weather was crap, but this isn’t fair. I think players would prefer two matches in a day then this.