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How long will it be before Billie-Jean King comes out and says that the extraordinary 2025 French Open Men’s Singles final between Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner will shorten their careers by at least a year? That was what BJK famously said of the 2012 Australian Open final between Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal, the longest ever men’s Major Singles Final (at just under six hours), so it is only logical that she would say the same of yesterday’s classic, which was the second longest ever men’s Major Singles final (at just under five and a half hours). And yet BJK and other critics of the five-set format are wrong, because the Alcaraz-Sinner masterpiece was a necessary reminder of the greatness of five-set tennis.

Alcaraz-Sinner Was A Classic – Albeit With An Underwhelming Ending

Yesterday’s French Open Final was so incredible that many tennis analysts, including The Tennis Podcast and indeed LWOT itself, are genuinely asking whether it was the greatest tennis match ever. That is probably a classic example of recency bias, whereby the most recent example of greatness in sport or art is immediately hailed as the greatest ever.

Yet the 2025 French Open Men’s Singles final was undeniably a great match, certainly taking its place in the top five of the greatest men’s finals ever, alongside Federer v Nadal at Wimbledon in 2008, the aforementioned Djokovic v Nadal in Melbourne in 2012, Borg v McEnroe at Wimbledon in 1980 (a match so good that the greatest film about tennis, Borg vs McEnroe (2017), was made about it) and Djokovic v Federer at Wimbledon in 2019. As undoubtedly the greatest ever French Open men’s final, it easily merits its place even in such stellar company.

The only thing that let Alcaraz-Sinner 2025 down was its ending, which is why it probably only ranks as fifth in the greatest finals ever rather than as number one. It may have featured the first ever 10-point match tiebreak to decide a Major title (the Covid-ravaged 2020 US Open Men’s final between Dominic Thiem and Alexander Zverev was decided by a regular tiebreak, with Thiem winning it 8-6), but that was actually the worst thing about the final, because it was so lop-sided. Alcaraz almost literally sprinted into a seven-point lead and eventually won it 10-2, albeit with the very last shot being a characteristic flash of Alcaraz brilliance.

Indeed, so (relatively) disappointing was the match tiebreak that it supported the argument that Grand Slam finals should only be settled with a match tiebreak after it goes to 12-12 in the final set, i.e. after the two players have effectively played the equivalent of an extra set to try and divide them. It is precisely because Federer v Nadal in 2008 went to 9-7 in the final set and Borg v McEnroe in 1980 went to 8-6 in the final set that they are likely to remain even more highly regarded by tennis fans and tennis historians than Alcaraz v Sinner in 2025. The endings in 1980 and 2008, with Borg and Nadal finally breaking their opponent’s serve after a truly epic contest, mean that they will live even longer in the memory than the ultimately disappointing match tie-break in 2025.

And It Reminded Everyone of the Greatness of Five-Set Tennis

Nevertheless, even allowing for the (relative) damp squib of its ending, Alcaraz v Sinner 2025 was unarguably a great tennis match – indeed, one of the greatest tennis matches ever – and a reminder that all the greatest tennis matches ever are five-setters. It is simply not possible to display the epic levels of endurance, both physical and mental, that both Alcaraz and Sinner demonstrated in a three-set match.

Yet BJK is not alone in questioning the continuing relevance of the five-set format. For example, Russell Fuller, the BBC’s Tennis Correspondent, has increasingly suggested that at the Majors both men and women should play three-set matches up until the quarter-finals and then they should both play five-set matches thereafter.

Although there may be some merit in extending the final matches of a women’s Major in this way, there is none whatsoever in reducing any matches of a men’s Major, even in the early rounds. It is because men have to play seven five-set matches to win a Major that it remains not only the ultimate challenge in tennis but arguably the ultimate challenge in all of sport. As Mardy Fish, the former US professional who reached the quarterfinals at three of the four Majors (only failing to make the last eight at Roland Garros), memorably Tweeted or X-ed during the match: “Toughest sport in the world. No clock to run out. No timeouts to call. No subs to come in for you. No one to sit there and tell you what to do… This is as good as it gets guys.”

Fish is absolutely right: a five-set Major final is “as good as it gets”, not just in tennis but in all of sport. And tennis as a sport would be absolutely crazy to do anything to reduce it.

Other Sports (and Arts) Have Cut Time – And Paid The Price

In the increasingly frenetic 21^st-century, in which we are often told that human beings (and not just young ones) have an attention span that is greatly reduced from what it was in the past, other sports and indeed arts have attempted to reduce the amount of time they take, but invariably with negative results.

The classic example is cricket. First-class or five-day cricket might just be the greatest team sport ever invented and it is certainly the most complex, because it unfolds over a considerable period of time and therefore allows for numerous changes in momentum during that time. By contrast, 20-20 or T20 cricket, in which teams play for just 20 overs each for about three hours, is a vastly reduced form of cricket (and not just in time) that is usually just a “hit-it” game more comparable to baseball or even rounders than first-class cricket. It is truly a Big Mac compared with a Michelin five-star, five-course meal.

And the same is true of art forms. The greatest examples of any art form – Shakespeare’s plays, Tolstoy’s novels, Francis Ford Coppola’s first two Godfather films or David Simon’s The Wire in television – are inevitably, indeed necessarily, long. They simply have to be long if they are to be epic – that is, encompassing the fullness of time, with all its ups and downs, and infinite switches between joy and despair and back again.

At its best, as proven again triumphantly by Alcaraz and Sinner yesterday in Paris, five-set tennis is every bit as epic as a Shakespeare play, a Tolstoy novel or a Coppola film. It is a five-act drama that seems to encompass almost the entirety of human existence, or at least the entirety of human emotion. And any attempt to end it would be utterly foolhardy – a wilful destruction of the very greatest sporting encounter that has ever been created.

In the early 1980s, David Puttnam, the great British film producer of masterpieces such as Chariots of Fire, Local Hero, The Killing Fields and Midnight Express, famously said of the increasing trend for films to be watched on television screens rather than cinema screens: “Reduce the size of the screen, reduce the size of the dream”. Well, the same principle is true in sport: “Reduce the size of the fight, reduce the size of the might”. The 2025 French Open final between Alcaraz and Sinner, the latest entry in the list of the greatest tennis matches ever played, was a necessary reminder of the greatness of five-set tennis – and it is a reminder that we should never forget.