While Wimbledon will never – we presume – go down the road of the Australian and US Opens and schedule evening sessions, the installation of the roof seems certain to lead to some late-night finishes at the All England Club.

In theory Wimbledon’s plans sound fine. The roof will be used when it rains and will enable late-finishing matches to be completed. Until now Centre Court matches that drag on into the evening have been stopped when the weather or the light make it impossible to continue. With the roof in place there would be no need to stop a match at 5-5 in the final set just because it got too dark, which was exactly the scenario when Tim Henman’s thriller against Carlos Moya was halted 12 months ago.

The roof will be a God-send for broadcasters, who must have to devote so much of their Wimbledon preparations to digging out footage to use during the inevitable rain delays. When the technology is available to play grass-court tennis under cover – and the All England Club is confident that the roof, lighting and air-conditioning will make no material difference to the surface or the atmospherics inside Centre Court – it certainly makes sense to use it.

The problem for Wimbledon, however, is that nobody knows when the final set of a match will end. Henman eventually beat Moya 13-11 last year and there have been plenty of matches that took much longer to finish. Eight years ago Mark Philippoussis beat Sjeng Schalken 20-18 in the final set of a third round match that lasted more than five hours. What would have happened if that match had started under the roof at, say, 7pm? Would it have carried on until reaching a natural conclusion after midnight?

There would be numerous problems with such late finishes at Wimbledon. Anyone who had come by public transport would need to have checked the times of the last trains and buses home. And what of those who had come by car and left it over the road on the golf course that doubles up as a car park for two weeks of the year? As for the local residents, what would they make of 15,000 people leaving the stadium after midnight?

The All England Club says these are issues that it has considered and will address between now and next summer. It gets nearly everything else right at one of the best organised sporting events in the world, so you have to expect them to come up with a modus operandi that will be acceptable to all.

And at least we will never – we hope - find ourselves in the same ridiculous situation as the Australian Open earlier this year, when Lleyton Hewitt and Marcos Baghdatis finished their match at 4.30 in the morning. You can’t imagine the good folk of SW19 being too happy about that.