Australia's Grand Slam is a Grand Mess

Virtue signalling administrators are ruining sport

I intend to spend next January in New York so that I can watch The Australian Open at a decent hour.

Last night’s epic five set match between former world number one Andy Murray and Aussie hopeful Thanasi Kokkinakis finished at 4am.

4am!

If you’re watching television at 4am it’s because you’re keen to pick up a gym system you’ll never use for five easy payments of $795. You’re not sitting in front of the tele at 4am because you’re watching top tennis in your home country. Or at least, you shouldn’t be.

Perhaps Tennis Australia should not begin best of five set matches at 11pm.

But what would I know? I’m not tournament boss Craig Tiley whose infallibility cannot be questioned.

This Australian Open is struggling to get people excited.

No Ash Barty.

No Nick Kyrgios.

No Roger Federer.

No Carlos Alcaraz.

No common sense.

Nadal and Djokovic are both injured.

And to add insult to injury, whites and Asians were made to pay $10 more per ticket to watch the tennis than Aboriginals.

Inclusion, they say!

It’s not enough for Tiley and his volley of Tennis Australia administrators to simply put on a tournament these days. They need to use the tournament as a vehicle through which to express their superior virtue. The tournament is a tool they will use to improve the country as they see fit.

The Open’s Indigenous Day was supposed to bring people together and, nothing brings people together like telling non-Indigenous people that the land they were born in is not theirs.

Always was, always will be nonsense.

And nothing creates harmony like charging non-Indigenous people a $10 levy for being non-Indigenous. I can’t believe Tennis Australia did that. We’re now determining ticket prices based on people’s skin colour and calling it progressive! It’s not. It’s a throw back to ugly days I thought we had left behind.

Next Friday is Pride Day at the Open. It remains to be seen whether heterosexuals will be forced to pay more at the gate than members of the LGBTQ community. A tax on being straight, if you will.

Nothing would surprise anymore.

Oh for the days when you could enjoy a sport event without being forced to endure a sermon.

If I want to listen to a sermon, I’ll go to church on Sunday. But when I go to the football, or the cricket, or the tennis, I just want to see a guy smash a ball over a net and watch the other guy try to return it. That’s it.

When Nadal is cracking a cross-court forehand, I couldn’t care less for Tennis Australia’s position on the Voice, or on gay rights. I wish they’d focus less on staging pre-match smoking ceremonies and more on sensible match scheduling.

Sport has an innate ability to bring people together.

When you go to the football wearing your club’s jumper you are no longer gay or straight, male or female, rich or poor, black or white. You’re a club supporter. If you’re wearing the team jumper, you’re included no matter who you are.

Sport brings people together automatically, without any need for Archbishop Craig Tiley and his sporting priests to lecturer, hector or sermonise.

But sports administrators can’t help themselves these days. They insist on hijacking every sporting event - whether cricket or football or tennis or horse racing - to parade their virtue and tinker with the social fabric of the country.

And in doing so, all they do is divide.

Why anyone would sit up until 10pm - let alone 4am - for this rubbish is beyond me.