Alison Waters Rallies Past Raneem El Welily In Semis Of Carol Weymuller Open
By Rob Dinerman

Dateline October 5th --- Trailing 2-0, 3-0 after having lost 10 of the last 11 points against the No. 3 ranked woman player in the world, Alison Waters determinedly bootstrapped her way out of that substantial deficit, weathered a scare late in the fourth game and won a stirring 7-11 9-11 11-7 12-10 11-3 victory this afternoon over the second-seeded Raneem El Welily in the semifinal round of the 41st Carol Weymuller Open at the Heights Casino Club. Waters will face Omneya Abdel Kawy, who earned an 11-2 7-11 11-8 11-5 win over the No. 1 seed Laura Massaro, thereby giving her country a split on a day when both semifinals matched a player from Egypt against one from England.

   There were several pronounced momentum swings during  the Waters-El Welily match, including a 6-0 first-game run from Raneem from 4-all to 10-4 that was only stopped when she served out of court at that juncture. After closing out that game, she surged from 4-8 to 11-9 to rescue the second, playing her best squash of the day during that spurt, highlighted by an amazing stretched-out retrieval at 9-all on a wickedly-angled Waters forehand working-boast that El Welily somehow not only got to but babied a drop-shot winner, eliciting a prolonged ovation from the appreciative crowd and giving her a game-ball, which she promptly converted by stabbing a backhand drive to perfect length.

   When El Welily then knocked off winners on the first three points of the third game, the second on a hardball-style backhand three-wall nick from the recesses of the back-left corner, she seemed in full control of the match and headed for a straight-game ticket to the final. It is therefore to the full credit of Waters, who kept relentlessly plugging away even when her cause seemed hopeless, that she wrested away the next seven points and pushed the action from that point onward, inexorably puncturing her daunting opponent's bravado and forcing enough tins to influence the outcome of each of the next three games.

   The key to the remainder after Waters's 11-7 third-game win occurred late in the fourth when El Welily saved several game-balls against her, the last if which ended on a tin-defying backhand drop shot that tied the tally at 10 and put El Welily, who won this event three years ago, just two points away from the final. Waters responded with a nick-finding forehand shallow volley and on the next point, in retrospect the most important of the match, El Welily had an open court with Waters pinned against the right wall but cut her forehand cross-drop a little too close and caught the top of the tin as the crowd groaned sympathetically.

  It was a reversal from which El Welily would not recover. She swiftly dropped the first three points of the fifth game, crept back to 3-4, but when she lost the next two hard-fought points, then caught the top of the tin with another drop shot, Waters had a 7-3 lead and El Welily seemed to be resigned to her fate. There was a surrendering aspect to the way she went through the final four points, all of which went swiftly to Waters on early-point El Welily errors and/or Waters winners. Waters was in understandably exuberant at the end, though she will be harshly challenge in the final if Kawy can duplicate the on-fire shot-making that enabled her to win her match against Massaro going away, just as Waters had done against El Welily. Both finalists were at the top of their games this afternoon in Brooklyn Heights, and it should make for a high-quality final tomorrow night.






Back To Main