This will come into play when the score has reached 6-6 and will offer victory to the first player to score 10 points and to be leading by at least two points.

The Australian Open is thus now on the same page as the US Open, which has featured final-set tiebreaks since 1970, and Wimbledon, which - after a 2018 men’s semi-final in which South Africa’s Kevin Anderson beat John Isner of the United States 26-24 in the fifth set - announced in October that it would adopt final set tie-breaks as from next summer.

It was innovation of a different kind that scheduled the 1977 Australian Open men’s singles final for New Year’s Eve - which meant that year saw two male champions crowned in that event.

How so?

Melbourne was seen as being too far to go for many of the leading American and European players, who preferred to stay home during the Christmas season and bolster their bank accounts with lucrative exhibition tournaments.

Tournament officials, concerned about the continuing lack of top-class entrants, devised a Cunning Plan - switching them from the beginning of January so that they took place from mid-December to the end of the year "to avoid the Christmas/New Year holiday period in a bid to please the players".

History records that this aspiration was not met. When December 1977 came around, once again, many of the world’s top players were absent. No Björn Borg. No Jimmy Connors. And no Guillermo Vilas, the reigning French and IS Open champion.

It would not be until 1988, when the Australian Open switched from the cramped, grass-court setting of the Kooyong Tennis Club to the all-singing, all-dancing hard-court venue where it currently resides - originally known as Flinders Park but re-named in 1996 - that the fourth Grand Slam event achieved greater parity with its three compadres.

It is now the largest annual sporting event in the southern hemisphere. The tournament holds the record for the highest attendance at a Grand Slam event, with 743,667 people attending the 2018 edition.

It was also the first Grand Slam tournament to feature indoor play during wet weather or extreme heat with its three primary courts, the Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne Arena and Margaret Court Arena all being equipped with retractable roofs.

At 37, Roger Federer will seek a third consecutive Australian title, having earned his 20th grand slam in Melbourne last time round.

"I think with my age people know that if I did something extraordinary that would be amazing," Federer said this week.

"If that didn't happen, maybe it's logical you can't produce that tennis every year. You also maybe need a bit of luck, and the draw to fall your way."

Federer added: "A lot of things need to happen to win any Slam. I hope that again it will be the start of a great season for me because the last two seasons have been crazy good for me.

"I've been very happy with how the off-season went.

"The last three or four weeks have been very intense. I'm very excited and motivated for this next season."

Meanwhile, Denmark’s former world number one Caroline Wozniacki, who earned her first Grand Slam at the last Australian Open, is also preparing for a title defence.

Also scheduled to be taking part are the current world number one male and female players, Novak Djokovic, seeking a record seventh Australian title, and the woman beaten by Wozniacki in the last final, Simona Halep.

There will also be much-anticipated returns for Serena Williams of the United States, currently ranked 16th, winner of this title in 2017 while eight weeks pregnant with baby Alexis Olympia.

The men’s singles are also expected to feature the current world number two, Rafael Nadal of Spain, and Britain’s Andy Murray, returning after a long and frustrating time off with a hip injury, who has been able to enter the event using his protected ranking of number two.

And Russia’s swiftly emerging 22-year-old Karen Khachanov, who beat Djokovic in the Paris Masters final last month, will also be in the hunt.

In fact, the world’s top 102 women and top 101 men have all confirmed they will compete at forthcoming event at Melbourne Park.

A far cry, then, from the days of the late 1970s. But for those players who decided to make the long, unseasonal trip Down Under in 1977, new opportunities beckoned.  And for Vitas Gerulaitis, whose dashing talents so often, so nearly gave him the beating of the likes of Borg, Connors and the upstart John McEnroe, this was a chance to earn his first Grand Slam title.

"If I could be as successful on the tennis court as I am off it, I would be number one," Gerulaitis, ladies’ man par excellence, once said.

Kooyong was where it happened. Albeit not without moments of characteristic angst and high drama. For this 23-year-old Lithuanian-American New Yorker was a high energy, high profile figure on and off the court.

Fellow American Roscoe Tanner - “the man from Lookout Mountain”, as he was fondly, and very often called by the late BBC tennis commentator Dan Maskell - had won the 1977 Australian Open men’s title in the Mark 1 version of the event in January of that year.

But the second seed made a first round exit after defeat by the unheralded New Zealander Chris Lewis - who would go on to reach the 1983 Wimbledon final.

The seedings were a triumph of experience over youth. Third seed was the 32-year-old Tony Roche, whose only major singles title had been earned a decade earlier.

Fourth seed was Roche’s fellow Australian Ken Rosewall, a legendary multiple champion, but who was now 43-years-old.

Seventh-seed was US player Stan Smith, at 31, five years off his 1972 Wimbledon final victory over Ilie Nastase.

So be it. Gerulaitis, the top seed, could only beat those in front of him, and he proceeded to work his way through the rounds.

After reaching the quarter-finals without losing a set, he only needed four to move past Australia’s Ray Ruffels.

A 6-1, 6-2, 6-4 victory over another home player, John Alexander, took him into the final, where he faced the unseeded British player John Lloyd.

The 23-year-old from Essex had earned a 3-6. 6-3, 7-5, 7-5 quarter-final win over Australia’s 33-year-old John Newcombe, who had earned his seventh Grand Slam title at the Australian Open two years earlier.

And he proved a tough opponent for Gerulaitis. After the American had taken the first two sets 6-3, 7-6, the Briton began to gain traction, winning the next two 7-5, 6-3 to send the final into a decisive fifth set.

Although as Gerulaitis subsequently revealed, the fifth set almost didn’t happen.

He had been affected by cramping in the second game of the fourth set and had seriously contemplated scratching from the match as they prepared for the fifth.

"The muscles in the back of my legs started cramping after getting cold during the break and then my shoulder, back and groin cramped up as well," he said afterwards.

"If I had fallen over in those last two sets I could not have got back to my feet again.  I almost walked off the court at the end of the fourth set - but hell, this was a grand slam tournament and I was not going to give in easily."

In the final set he appeared to regain some of his earlier mobility and was soon punishing his opponent with some unplayable returns of serve, eventually winning the decisive set 6-2 to earn a winner’s cheque of $28,000 (£22,000/€24,000).

Lloyd, who claimed a runner-up cheque for $14,000 (£11,000/€12,000), said the key point in the match  had come in the second set when he had a set point against the Gerulaitis serve but mishit a backhand return which the American then smashed for a winner.

Earlier in the year Gerulaitis had met his friend Borg, the defending champion, in the Wimbledon semi-finals. The Swede - whose chances in the subsequent US Open were undermined after he had injured a shoulder muscle while water-skiing with You Know Who - won 8-6 in the fifth set before earning what would be the second of his five consecutive titles in SW19 in another five-setter against Connors.

Gerulaitis died, tragically, on September 17 in 1994, at the age of 40. While he was visiting a friend's home in Southampton, New York an improperly installed pool heater caused carbon monoxide gas to seep into the guesthouse where Gerulaitis was sleeping, causing his death by poisoning.

Knowledgeable observers of the game believe that match against Borg in 1977 was his finest effort. But the victory in Melbourne six months later must have been sweet indeed.

In his 2013  autobiography The Outsider, Connors, who had first met his fellow New Yorker when they were aspiring teenage players, fondly recalled the high-living companion:

"I was lucky to have friends who watched my back," he wrote. "I remember one evening when I was offered a line of coke; before I could even respond Vitas had the guy by the collar and was dragging him towards the door, saying: 'I told you to keep that shit away from Connors!'"

At the 1980 WCT Tennis Invitational in Maryland Gerulaitis earned a 7-5, 6-2 win over Connors, playing some of the best tennis of his life against a man who had beaten him on the previous 16 occasions.

"Let that be a lesson to you all," Gerulaitis announced with a grin at his post-match press conference. "Nobody beats Vitas Gerulaitis 17 times in a row."

Connors recalled how, after winning the 1978 US Open title, he was celebrating at a Manhattan restaurant when his friend arrived to congratulate him.

"Vitas drove up and parked right in front of the restaurant and, let me tell you, he was hard to miss; Vitas was the only guy around tennis - or around most places - who drove a yellow Rolls Royce.

"What the public saw was the real Vitas: the dazzling smile, the free-spirited guitar-playing rocker, the over-the-top playboy lifestyle.  Yet he was also one of the most decent guys I’ve ever known.