Andy Murray has described the scheduling of the US Open as “total chaos” following record-breaking delays at the start and finish in Flushing Meadows.

The 2012 champion, who retired from professional tennis after the Olympics last month, struck as Zheng Qinwen completed a grueling fourth-round win over Donna Vekic that didn’t end until 2:15 a.m. local time.

It was the latest finish of a women’s match at the US Open ever, and it came a few days after the latest start, when Aryna Sabalenka and Ekaterina Alexandrova began their match eight minutes after midnight and did not finish until around two in the morning.

This despite the fact that the organizers had stated before the tournament that they would “establish a strategy” to prevent night games from lasting into the early hours of the morning.

Murray wrote on X: “The scheduling situation in tennis is total chaos.”

He posted a thumbs-down emoji and added: “It looks so amateur when games are on at 2, 3, 4am. Fix it.”

In a press conference ahead of the US Open, tournament director Stacey Allaster confirmed plans to give umpires the ability to move matches between courts if this prevents them from starting before 11:15 p.m.

“We’ve had late games here and we’ll continue to have late games here,” she said. “We’re setting a strategy now.”

“If the second game of the night is at Ashe or the last game is at Armstrong and those games are not over by 11:15 p.m., it is at the discretion of the referee to postpone the game. It depends on a lot of variables, like, ‘Do we have a broadcast team, do we have a ball team?’ and so on.”

Sabalenka later revealed that although she had the opportunity to pull out, she decided to wait and see what happened in the fourth set of Novak Djokovic’s third-round loss to Popyrin.

“They asked us for our opinion,” Sabalenka explained. “They kept the staff in the stands so we could move around, but there was also the possibility that it would rain. It was tricky, so we waited to see how the fourth set (of Djokovic’s match) would turn out.”

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