The crowd had strained their vocal cords in anger and dismay as only French crowds can and Rafael Nadal had returned to the peace of the Palais Omnisports locker-room, where, according to Andy Roddick, he was seated in a corner, his head in his hands. “I had never seen him like that before,” the American said. “It is how we’re all feeling.”

Within four days of this unjustifiable contempt for whether the Spaniard was injured or not when he withdrew from his BNP Paribas Masters quarter-final after losing the first set to Nikolay Davydenko, the Wimbledon champion and world No 1 had pulled out of the end-of-season Masters Cup in Shanghai. It will be profoundly duller.

Imagine a similar situation 12 months hence in London, when the ATP World Tour Finals (yes, another name-change beckons) are staged at the 02 Arena, with Andy Murray knackered and deciding not to play. Recriminations would be immense with — as usual in tennis — everyone blaming everyone else.

That is the way the sport is heading. Unless further savings can be found in a calendar that tortures body and mind, the ATP’s showcase event will once more resemble an outpatients’ ward, the players discussing their war wounds and the public wailing about injustices. But suggest that a tournament considers moving, shrinking or that it be removed altogether and before you can say new balls, the writs are flying.

That is because there is more at stake than ever — a $1 billion (about £625 million) investment for 2009 bringing a 25-50 per cent increase in prize-money for the top ten tournaments from 2006 levels. Then there are the players. No event is worth putting on unless Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal is playing — Rotterdam tournament organisers flew a group of Dutch press to Madrid for a day last month after the Spaniard agreed to play in their event next February.

The ATP says that its calendar for 2009 “makes fair demands of the players”. The ATP is an organisation that purports to represent tournaments and players on the basis of shared ownership; the players will tell you that those they have elected to the board have ended up voting for the good of the tour rather than that of the players. Ivan Ljubicic, the Croat recently voted on as a player representative, says that he is bringing the “pure” view from the locker-room, one diluted heavily in recent years.

In the past two decades, there has been a decisive shift in the geographical player base. Whereas it was once American-driven, the Europeans now proliferate. But it is not only Nadal, Federer and Novak Djokovic who are keen to know why the hard-court Masters tournaments in the spring, in Indian Wells and Miami, were granted what amounts to a protected status, why they have 96-strong draws as opposed to the majority that are 56 in number. Could not precious time be saved in the calendar if they were reduced in size and squeezed together so that there was not a full week of heel-kicking in between?

And what of the time lost between the 2010 Paris Masters — the 2009 calendar is set in stone — and the World Tour Finals in London? Why not finish in Paris on Sunday and start at the 02 two days later with a Monday night finish?

When I asked Ljubicic last week whether there were recurring themes of debate, he talked of “a couple of issues I don’t feel comfortable talking about right now but that are terrible from a player’s view”. Roddick said that he didn’t want the kind of “s***” he has had to tolerate for the past decade being foisted on the players of the future.

Ljubicic is among those who will get their heads down in Shanghai to narrow the list of candidates who wish to become chairman or chief executive of the ATP Tour. Some want both titles, some want one or the other. “We need to focus our energies on the quality of the tennis rather than the quantity,” Ljubicic said. “We need to make it clear that players make money only if we play and if we win. It’s not like we are trying not to play.”