In the new Davis Cup Finals format, each country-versus-country tie consists of three matches: two singles and one doubles. The singles rubbers are played first, so it’s possible that the doubles rubber will be “dead”–irrelevant to the result of the tie. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Davis Cup Finals organizers aimed to make the doubles matter more, by using tiebreakers (based on sets and games won) to determine which sides advance from the round-robin phase to the knock-out rounds. It may have helped keep dead doubles rubbers interesting at first, but by the final days of the round-robin stage, teams that automatically qualified for the knock-out rounds had no remaining incentive to play doubles. Canada gave the United States a walkover, and Australia retired after one game. This was probably inevitable, but it isn’t ideal. Fans would presumably prefer to watch more tennis, and unfinished matches could wreak havoc with the tiebreaker system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are a lot of possible ways to restructure the event–so many that I’m not going to explore that topic today. Since dead doubles rubbers are inevitable, I’d instead like to look at how often we should expect them to occur and, given that they will occur, whether that truly sidelines doubles in comparison with singles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Live doubles<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n This topic was prompted by a question ahead of this week’s podcast<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n