On Friday in Melbourne, Daniil Medvedev triumphed in five sets over Emil Russuvuori, with the contest concluding at 3:39am local time.
On Tuesday night, Jannik Sinner and Andrey Rublev commenced their match at 10:45pm local time, after three long previous quarter-finals between Coco Gauff and Marta Kostyuk, Djokovic and Taylor Fritz, and Aryna Sabalenka and Barbora Krejcikova.
Djokovic, who beat Fritz in four sets, said: “We’ve seen in the past some late finishes, and I know for the crowds and for the tournament in a way it’s kind of exciting to see a 4.00am finish, a 3.00am finish.
“I was part of some of those, you know. But it’s definitely not fun for us. The good thing about the quarterfinalist on the men’s section is we have two days. So I think that’s plenty of time to get a good sleep and recover.”
Djokovic’s opponent Fritz argued that the late starts were “rough” on players, pointing to how it impacted their body clocks for the remainder of the tournament having had their sleep cycles thrown out of kilter.
The Serbian added: “Scheduling has become a hot topic. We talked about it, I think few matches ago I talked about it on the press conference, and I couldn’t give a really clear answer to that, because it’s really up to Grand Slams and our respective tours to think about the ways to accommodate both male and female players in a proper way so we have no late finishes.
“I think ATP came up with this rule change, but that’s on ATP Tour. Grand Slams are not part of the ATP Tour. They have their separate rules and regulations that obviously are independent from our tours.
“We know that there are two sessions, right? So if you are scheduling two matches starting at 12:00 with men playing best-of-five, if it goes three, four hours, takes for them I think 45 minutes to clean the stadium, bringing new fans for the night session, so it takes a lot of time.
“Coco Gauff played a long match today. I played a very long match today. Then you have the night session starting two hours after they were scheduled, after the time they were scheduled. So not ideal, obviously not great also for Sinner and Rublev.”