Martina Navratilova has slammed the impending rule changes to men's doubles, saying they will hurt the sport of tennis as a whole.

The world's top male doubles players have launched a legal fight against their ruling body, the ATP, to prevent it from implementing scoring changes aimed at shortening matches.

They are also contesting the qualifying rules, which the players said would eventually eliminate doubles specialists.

"I think the (ATP) are just trying to get rid of doubles and they're doing it slowly," Navratilova said on Wednesday after reaching the women's doubles semi-finals at the U.S. Open with Germany's [Images] Anna-Lena Groenfeld.

"I think they're going at it completely the wrong way. I completely agree with the players because they had no say in the matter.

"The players are against it. The fans are against it. They want to see doubles. It's just a very near-sighted decision by the tournament promoters."

The 48-year-old, who has won 40 grand slam doubles titles, said it was an integral part of the sport.

"You become a better tennis player if you play doubles," she said.

"You would be missing out on a big part of the game by getting rid of it. I've always been a proponent of doubles.

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"Singles helps your doubles, and doubles helps your singles."

The scoring changes will be tried in six tournaments beginning the week after the U.S. Open.

The system for qualifying for ATP doubles events is planned to be pegged to singles rankings only by the year 2008.

Aimed at limiting doubles matches to 80 minutes, sets would be abbreviated to the first team to win five games, with no changeover breaks and a sudden-death point taking the place of deuce. A regular tiebreaker would be used if teams were locked at 5-5.

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