During the tournament a number of games went into the early hours of the morning, casting a shadow over the event, which took place at the Birmingham Indoor Arena from last Tuesday and concluded last night.

Denmark's Peter Gade (pictured) was forced to take to the court at the Birmingham Indoor Arena after midnight, with the "evening" games eventually concluded at 3am – five hours after schedule, and when supporters had understandably gone home for the evening.

Gade lost to Britain's Rajiv Ouseph and was angry at the late start, saying: "Why are we not in the same league as tennis or golf?

"This is why.

"For this to happen in my last All England is very disappointing."

One cause of the problems was that four courts rather than five were used for the tournament, while another has been the nature of the sport – with three first to 21 point games being introduced in 2006, and an increasing number of games lasting the distance.

Badminton England chief executive Adrian Christy told a news conference that this should be looked at again.

"There are several possible remedies," he said.

"We could start a day earlier, or do away with the qualifying competition; there are all sorts of ways we could look at it.

"If we had had five courts we would still have finished at midnight.

"I think there will be changes.

"But I think it's hard to say what they will be.

"We need to take stock of other Premier and Super Series events as well to ensure we make the right decisions.

"What happened last night is partly a consequence of the success of the series, and by the quality of the play."

Badminton World Federation (BWF) events director Darren Parks echoed those comments, saying: "I guess we were victims of our own success in one respect in that the actual matches have been tremendously compelling and really exciting and very close – we actually had quite a few three-setters.

"What we have got here are top-ranked players so you have very closely fought matches which is right.

"Do we want to be finishing at 3am?

"No, and that's something we are going to have to look at and see how we can solve that for the future."

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