Holly Wainwright

Oh, oh my God.

I know.

I'm shocked.

Now, to be clear, the umpires who get to adjudicate over the big Grand Slam titles, so French Open, US Open, Wimbledon, Aussie Open, etc., are called the gold badge ones.

So they are the top of their field, just like in any other sport.

You don't just pull the volunteer referee from Saturday football and put them on the grand final.

So these are the big guns.

But in a game that was played by Paraguayan Adolfo Daniel Vallejo, he criticized his female umpire and said that this level of game should only be umpired by a man.

His game was five hours long, which is like, that's really, really long.

Oh my gosh.

And it was hot.

And the crowd got rowdy.

And we have talked a little bit lately, if we've talked about tennis at all, about how the polite, like just sitting around and doing little finger claps at tennis is over.

Everybody yells now.

And his words were, a game like this, he got asked whether or not he thought it should have been umpired by a woman, by a magazine called Clay Magazine.

And he said, it has to be refereed by a man.

Because it's a very demanding crowd and you need a lot of strength to go against the crowd.

It's not normal for the crowd to be shouting for a full minute without any play in a match where the physical aspect matters so much.

If you give a player a lot of time, he's going to take advantage of it.

So basically, he's making the point that an umpire, a big part of what a tennis umpire does is they tell the crowd to shut up.