The Australian Open Is Too Much Of A Good Thing

MELBOURNE — What they say is true: you watch less tennis when you cover a major tournament in person. I can tell you that 15 journalists piled into Sorana Cirstea’s press conference after her three-set loss to Naomi Osaka, which featured some celebration etiquette-related beef and a particularly salty handshake. I can tell you that Cirstea downplayed the exchange. After the third straight question about it, her eyes widened, her voice heightened, and she said “is this the big thing that happened tonight?!” in a tone that will swim around my head until I expire. I can tell you how I felt when Carlos Alcaraz raised his arms to the sky in a semifinal-grade celebration after his first and second-round victories, neither of which were competitive enough to beget catharsis (surprised – maybe he’s emphasizing that he doesn’t need Juan Carlos Ferrero to win?). I can tell you my most surreal moment of the tournament: A fan asked Observer writer George Simms to take a picture of him during the second-round match between Daniil Medvedev and Jesper de Jong when Simms was working in the media section; Simms gamely obliged, only for the fan to critique the way he cropped the picture, on and off, for the next five minutes. This narrowly beat out Maria Sakkari’s epic slice return winner and the moment I realized the milkshakes at Australia’s first Shake Shacks – exclusive to the Australian Open – were not only one-third more expensive than their American counterparts, but the cups were a third smaller, for quantities of pinch me. 

My read of the tournament’s general flow, though, has been compromised by writing, scurrying around to press conferences, occasionally remembering that I need to eat and drink, and reapplying sunscreen at the rate of a Novak Djokovic ball bounce. People feel this Australian Open is a bit underwhelming through the first week and a half in terms of pure match quality, I think? I have found it enthralling and all-consuming despite all the blowouts, though perhaps not always for the right reasons. 

Let’s start with the crowds. More than 100,000 people walked Melbourne Park on the first day of the 2026 Australian, mainly because the powers that be decided to sell grounds passes without limit, as long as there was demand. Demand was such that the ground would have been invisible to any aliens who may have been spying from outer space. I peeked into John Cain Arena to gauge the line to Shake Shack and was met with a shuffling crowd so dense it felt like a singular mass, as if five feet of liquid were sloshing around the stadium. The overpriced sugar drink would have to come later. In Rod Laver Arena the first few days of the tournament, it was impossible not to notice the swaths of empty seats right behind the baseline, the priciest tickets going unsold.