Post-Mortem On The U.S. Men’s Results
In The U.S. Open Qualifying Round
By Rob Dinerman of DailySquashReport.com
Dateline October 3rd, 2011 --- In the wake of the American men’s dismal performance this past Thursday evening in the first round of the qualifying for the U.S. Open, one of the most significant events on American soil all year, virtually everyone directly involved with the program --- players, coaches and administrators --- should be taking a hard look in the mirror. All six entrants were eliminated in peremptory three-games-to-love fashion (as was wild-card main-draw entry Chris Gordon, hence zero for seven and zero for 21 games overall) in a fiasco that left several of the top U.S. players wounded in body and spirit to a degree that threatens to have a substantial carryover impact on the upcoming quadrennial Pan American Games in Guadalajara, Mexico. Even the U.S. Squash web site, which frequently tries to over-state its players’ results (spinning the solid seventh-place finish at the World Team Championships in Germany this past summer, for example, as a breakthrough of historic proportions) was reduced to an embarrassed silence on the topic of how its players had fared last week, referencing the qualifying rounds only with a bare-bones terse announcement that “the qualifying draw is now complete” that pointedly avoided any reference to the outcomes of the matches.
The only American player who gave a creditable accounting of himself was Princeton junior and 2011 Intercollegiate Individuals champion Todd Harrity, who played a highly competitive match against French veteran Julien Balbo, nearly taking the second-game tiebreaker, before Balbo finally prevailed by a tally of 11-8 16-14 11-7. Harrity, following up on his strong showing as a member of the U.S. team that competed in Germany a few months ago, demonstrated both his potential and ongoing improvement noticeably enough to cause one respected former Ivy League title-winning coach in the gallery at the host Merion Cricket Club that night to remark that “the silver just needs a little more polish” before losses like the one he sustained against Balbo will turn into victories at this level.
The remaining U. S. men’s results were brutal. Reigning seven-time U.S. National champion Julian Illingworth is ranked 27 spots ahead of his first-round-qualifying opponent, Shawn Delierre, whom Illingworth had defeated in four games in the final of a PSA tournament in Salt Lake City in July. But Delierre, buoyed by a good performance in the World Team tourney (5-0 at No. 2 in Canada’s lineup) and by his triumph in the Nash Cup, an event in Toronto that was held the weekend prior to the U.S. Open, thrashed Illingworth by the one-sided score of 11-4, 5 and 6, then won over former PSA top-40 Balbo to earn a slot in the main draw. Illingworth’s shot selection and movement, normally full of energy and force, were instead so tentative and demure that at no point did he appear to make any adjustments to seize the initiative, and Delierre grabbed the opportunity and carried the play throughout, scoring often on front-court forays and never relinquishing control in his 31-minute sprint to an unexpected but compelling victory.
2009-2011 U.S. Nationals finalist Gilly Lane’s match was disastrous as well for the American camp, but in a different and more far-reaching way. Plagued for several months by a bulging-disc back injury that allowed him to play in only one of the seven U. S. team matches in Germany, but thought to have finally fully recuperated, Lane, after dropping the first game of his match against Malaysian Ong Beng Hee 11-4, took a 9-7 lead in the second game, only to both lose that game’s last four points (part of a 15-3 match-ending run against him) and re-aggravate his back condition on the second point of the third game, severely constraining his mobility throughout that 11-3 close-out game, during which he spent much of his between-points time stretching the back in a vain attempt to loosen it up.
Lane had been listed as part of the American team entry for the upcoming Pan American Games competition (in which he was slated to join Illingworth and Gordon, who as noted was wild-carded into the U.S. Open main draw, where he was promptly ousted three-love by Thierry Lincou) but will now be unable to play (his full recovery will likely consume several months’ time). With Harrity also unavailable for that prestigious event due to his schoolwork commitments at Princeton, Lane’s spot will likely be taken by Graham Bassett, Lane’s former mid-2000’s Penn teammate and the only American other than Illingworth, Lane and Gordon ranked in the PSA top 300, who lost 11-4, 3 and 6 to England’s Chris Ryder Thursday night in less than a half-hour. There will be no margin for error in Mexico, where the squash teams are limited to three players, rather than the usual four, which means that every player has to play in every team match in this competition, regardless of his physical state, otherwise that match will be defaulted.
The other pair of American participants were junior champion Dylan Murray, the talented teenager whose first taste of this level of play will likely be a beneficial experience as he moves along in his career, and Dartmouth’s Chris Hanson, who were convincingly out-played by their respective opponents, Martin Knight of New Zealand and Alan Clyne of Scotland. Other than Harrity’s three close games with Balbo and Lane’s 11-9 second game with Ong Beng Hee, in not one of the 14 remaining qualifying-round games was an American player able to amass even seven points, with five of those games ending with an 11-3 tally.
Four of the six matches lasted less than 35 minutes, and only in Harrity’s match did an American player win as many as 16 total points. (The American women fared almost as poorly, with four of their five entrants losing 3-0 in the first round of the qualifying, in each case in under a half-hour, though the fifth, Amanda Sobhy, did manage to qualify into the main draw.) Paul Assaiante, Director of the U.S. Squash Elite Teams Program and head coach of the Trinity College squad that has won the national college team championship each of the past 13 years, and U.S. Men’s coach Chris Walker, now recovered from a midsummer illness, both of whom will be accompanying the U.S. team to Mexico towards the end of this month, know that they have a formidable challenge ahead of them as they attempt to restore the players’ battered confidence in the little time they have to get the team ready for the Pan American Games just a few weeks hence.
Back To Main
