Like folding sheets, tennis is a more exciting watch if one person does it

Or maybe the urge to play ­tennis in this most companionable of formats just hits you like that sometimes. Whatever, you know an event has been thoroughly redesigned with a whole new audience in mind when the current holders of the title only get in on a wild card, and after bitterly complaining. It’s like Rory McIlroy having to phone up Augusta next year and beg for a tee-time.

They had done everything: imported box office names, slimmed down the game and set lengths, removed the event to its own “special” slot ahead of the main tournament. Not to mention that red flag to out-wave all others at a sports event: the DJ booth. I thought the saddest thing I had ever seen was an in-house DJ doing a set on a Wednesday to an almost deserted clothing department at Harvey Nichols, but the posse on the decks at Arthur Ashe Stadium this week drove it painfully close.

For Sara Errani and Andrea Vavassori then, sweet vindication. By retaking their grossly devalued title, they have stuck it firmly to the organisers and the glossy arrivistes alike, and gone home with precisely five times what they would have earned if it was 2024 again and the USTA hadn’t had this terrible idea. Plus, of course, they get the bonus of profile-boosting exposure for their efforts, which, let’s be honest, is pretty unusual in their quarter of the sport. For at least a week or two, more people, when asked to say who Errani and Vavassori are, won’t be forced to shoot a rough guess that it’s a theatrical talent agency.

But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? I’m happy to concede, as Judy Murray vehemently and cogently argued this week, that doubles is a specialist skill. The question is whether it’s a particularly watchable specialist skill by comparison with the specialist skill involved in playing singles. Personally, I’m tempted to believe that tennis, like folding sheets or moving a cupboard, is easier if two people do it together. But even if I’m wrong about that, certainly someone who can efficiently fold sheets solo or take a wardrobe upstairs without assistance has really got my ­attention, while the other way feels a bit “So what?”

Which is why we’re where we are right now, with the DJs and the inflated prizes.

Yet was anyone persuaded to change their mind this week? Did anyone new come on board? Ultimately, what we were watching when the court eventually fell silent (or almost silent; this was the US Open) looked an awful lot like mixed doubles to me, under the very thinnest of disguises.

It was the same with the week’s other much-touted format revamp, Match of the Day. That also seemed to have been made subject to ill-­advised meddling for meddling’s sake, which had similarly sparked heated debates around its prestige and legitimacy going forward.

No DJ booth, it’s true, but three presenters on rotation, a prospect which some traditionalists seemed to find just as upsetting. There were closely parallel concerns around the removal of Gary Lineker, too, which you may just possibly have heard or read about: what if you don’t concede the need for specialists? Judy Murray would have had a view, I’m sure.

And, again, the suspicion couldn’t help but float through your mind that this was all in the cause of bringing in a fresh audience which probably isn’t there to be brought in.

And when push came to shove, Match of the Day didn’t look much different, either. It was still fundamentally a bunch of more or less interesting football highlights with Alan Shearer jawing on.

Maybe some things are just irreducibly themselves at the end of the day, and no amount of blue-sky thinking by over-excited visionaries is ever going to change them.

Photograph by Timothy A. Clary/AFP