{"id":99702,"date":"2026-03-18T07:15:22","date_gmt":"2026-03-18T11:15:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/?p=99702"},"modified":"2026-03-17T23:30:00","modified_gmt":"2026-03-18T03:30:00","slug":"miami-open-joao-fonseca-sela","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/2026\/03\/18\/miami-open-joao-fonseca-sela\/","title":{"rendered":"Miami Open Once Again Makes Scheduling Mistake with Joao Fonseca"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since its move to Hard Rock Stadium in 2019, the Miami Open has been full of logistics issues on top of the area-typical rain delays. And as the 2026 edition of the tournament is getting underway, it’s already being bombarded with problems.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Tuesday night, the Miami Open <\/span>announced<\/span><\/a> that due to rain issues, there would be no play on Stadium Court on Wednesday. Despite players practicing on Stadium Court, the tournament maintained that areas of the stadium require \u201cadditional preparation\u201d for match-ready conditions.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

On the slate for Wednesday is the Round of 128 for both the ATP and the WTA. The matches that were slated to be played on Stadium Court were moved to Grandstand. A simple enough solution, but the tournament ran into a problem.<\/span><\/p>\n

That problem is Joao Fonseca.<\/span><\/p>\n

Last year, Miami\u2019s large Brazilian population filled the stands<\/a> for Fonseca in every single round, culminating in a close third-round loss to Alex de Minaur. Fonseca\u2019s game and ranking has improved monumentally since then, and his return to Miami is highly anticipated. He\u2019s an automatic Stadium Court bid, and the seats will sell.<\/span><\/p>\n

To put him on Grandstand would be chaos. But instead of trying to regulate that, the Miami Open pushed his first-round match against Fabian Marozsan to Thursday, when Stadium Court will be ready.<\/span><\/p>\n

This may have averted the potential crowd issue, but it creates more problems than it solves. The winner of the match will have to play again the next day, and to make matters worse for them it will be against a well-rested Carlos Alcaraz. The two-week format that Miami and most other 1000-level tournaments have adopted give players a day\u2019s rest in between matches, and to deny that to Fonseca or Marozsan because of crowd optics is highly unfair to both players.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Ironically, Fonseca was in this exact position last week in Indian Wells. His second-round opponent, Karen Khachanov, was delayed when attempting to leave Dubai and was given an extra day to rest along with Andrey Rublev. As such, Fonseca played the next day after defeating Khachanov. But the major difference here is that the decision by Indian Wells was made with player wellbeing in mind. Miami\u2019s was not.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/smartframe-embed><\/p>\n

Alcaraz will be the favorite whether the match is against Fonseca or Marozsan, but the scheduling change has hurt their chances further.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Had Fonseca\u2019s first-round match been put on Grandstand, it absolutely would have been a difficult position for the Miami Open to be in. But this is a tennis tournament, and tennis players should come first.<\/span><\/p>\n

Main Photo Credit: David Gonzales-Imagn Images<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since its move to Hard Rock Stadium in 2019, the Miami Open has been full of logistics issues on top of the area-typical rain delays. And as the 2026 edition of the tournament is getting underway, it’s already being bombarded with problems.\u00a0 Tuesday night, the Miami Open announced that due to rain issues, there would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5769,"featured_media":94770,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,2,9],"tags":[5118,5729,18097,18636,844,859],"class_list":["post-99702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-atp","category-featured","category-news","tag-atp-miami-open","tag-carlos-alcaraz","tag-fabian-marozsan","tag-joao-fonseca","tag-karen-khachanov","tag-miami-masters"],"modified_by":"Yesh Ginsburg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5769"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99702"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99727,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99702\/revisions\/99727"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/94770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}