Tennis bosses will consider using the Madrid doubles tournament as a guinea pig for a 15-second shot clock trial in the latest effort to speed up the sport. i understands a whole raft of trial rule changes are due to be presented for approval at the ATP Council this week, which will then be tested out during the men’s doubles at the Madrid Masters, which starts on 22 April, in a bid to reduce “dead time” in matches. If approved, this latest trial will mean doubles players in Madrid are given just 15 seconds to start the next point where the previous rally lasted three shots or fewer. Longer ra ..read more

Andy Murray‘s Wimbledon plans are in doubt after the two-time champion ruptured two ankle ligaments at the Miami Open. The 36-year-old is set for an “extended spell” on the sidelines in what is expected to be his final year of professional tennis. Murray lost a marathon encounter to Czech player Tomas Machac by a 5-7 7-5 7-6 (5) scoreline on Sunday, and has left the US with injuries to both his anterior talofibular ligament (ATFL) and calcaneofibular ligament (CFL). “Yesterday towards the end of my match in Miami I suffered a full rupture of my ATFL and near full thickness rupture of my CFL ..read more

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) has reportedly launched a $2bn (£1.56bn) deal to merge the two professional tennis tours. The bid comes in response to a proposal by the four grand slams to redesign the tennis calendar and condense it to 14 events a year in a so-called “Premium Tour”. Cover was broken on the Saudi deal at a meeting of top tournament owners and administrators on Saturday in California, according to the Telegraph, just minutes after they had been given further details on the Premium Tour. What is on the table? Before the offer was shared, the four grand slam bodies ..read more

Tennis insiders have called for a shake-up of the sport’s anti-doping system after former world No 1 Simona Halep was cleared to play. Halep’s four-year suspension after testing positive for a banned substance was this week reduced by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), who ruled she had not deliberately ingested the substance. The International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) had original deemed Halep guilty of intentionally doping, a judgment that was overturned by CAS on appeal. They knocked the suspension down to nine months and found Halep to have done nothing wrong except ingest a c ..read more

There is a new star of British tennis. Well, not that new. Just an old star finally starting to shine. It seems rather inappropriate to be calling Katie Boulter old at 27, but it is now six years since she first won a round at Wimbledon and alerted the Great British public to her obvious talents. Victory in San Diego on Sunday night over Marta Kostyuk bagged Boulter her first 500-level title – only 1000 events and grand slams are bigger – and moved her up to No 27 in the world, a career-high. She will have a few days off now before heading to Indian Wells, the first half of the American “Sunsh ..read more

World No 5 Andrey Rublev has had more than $150,000 (approx. £118,000) of prize money and 200 ranking points reinstated after the men’s professional tour (ATP) admitted fault in his disqualification last week. Rublev was defaulted from the semi-final in Dubai last week after a line judge claimed he had called one of the officials “a f**king moron” in his native Russian. The 26-year-old player insisted he was “was not even talking in Russian”, but was disqualified by the tournament supervisor for abusing an official – a result that ordinarily deprives players of any prize money or ranking point ..read more

What did the bosses at Netflix, surely the most powerful people in broadcasting, learn from their first foray into tennis with Break Point, the fly-on-the-wall documentary now into its second season? On the basis of Sunday’s “The Netflix Slam”, it was that the tennis didn’t matter too much and that less is very much more. But they were not afraid to splash the cash on star quality for this exhibition match between Rafael Nadal and Carlos Alcaraz, a Las Vegas knock-up for two great players who were more than happy to take a big payday in exchange for a glorified practice session. Exhibitions in ..read more

Players have been warned by Mexican tennis authorities they should not leave the confines of the Mexican Open this week in Acapulco due to crime levels and infrastructure problems in the city. In an email seen by i, players, their support teams and ATP staff were told it was “strongly recommended” they confine their movements to the tournament hotel and the tennis venue, as well as only using tournament vehicles for transport. Organisers told players they had concerns about the “significant infrastructure issues” in the city caused by Hurricane Otis last October, as well as “high amounts of cr ..read more

Andy Murray has never been afraid to speak his mind on a tennis court. Unlike his off-court persona – thoughtful, polite and with a dry but wicked sense of humour – his on-court character is more fiery, alternating between self-deprecation and anger. His coaching box often bear the brunt of it, to the extent that former coach Amelie Mauresmo stopped sitting there, instead moving to somewhere more discreet, out of the firing line. “Andy is complex,” she said diplomatically when they split in 2016. But Murray’s latest outburst was aimed at only one person, himself, even if he was staring at his ..read more

Tennis nerds will be more than familiar with Tennis Abstract, by far the world’s most useful, freely available database when it comes to the fuzzy yellow ball. Among its tidal wave of statistics is dominance ratio, a number that simplifies tennis’s unique scoring system by comparing a player’s return points won to their opponent’s. It is as good a way as any of judging the margin in a match – and it tells us that eight of Emma Raducanu’s 20 most dominant tour victories came in one three-week period: en route to her historic US Open title. It is telling that she has not accumulated many more vi ..read more