US Defeats India For 7th Place In Paderborn,
Highest US Finish Since 1983 Hardball Squad
by Ted Gross for DailySquashReport.com
August 28, 2011 - The eighth-seeded American men’s team beat India 2-0 in a playoff for seventh place yesterday to record the best US finish in a world championship since 1983.
PSA #32 Julian Illingworth upended #27 Saurav Ghosal in four games, while Princeton’s Todd Harrity beat promising 17-year-old Indian junior Mahesh Mangaonkar in five.
Overall, the US team finished with a respectable record of 4 wins and 3 losses.
They defeated the Ukraine, Switzerland, Canada and India, while losing to Italy, Egypt and Malaysia (unfortunately being shut out in all three losses).
The Malaysia match, in retrospect, may be the one that got away, as the US was twice unable to consolidate early leads and did not appear to compete well down the stretch, with the chance to play off for a highest-ever US finish of 5th-place on the line.
Still, the 2011 team stakes claim to the best American finish since 1983, when WPSA hardball tour players Mark Talbott, Ned Edwards, Kenton Jernigan and John Nimick, playing an unfamilar game on an unfamilar-sized court, pulled off a gritty 7th-place finish in Auckland, New Zealand.
Edwards also played on the 1981 team, alongside fellow-hardball players Billy Andruss and Stu Goldstein, and that US team also managed a surprising 7th-place finish out of 23 countries at the world championships in Stockholm, Sweden.
The softball game was so lightly regarded by US Squash in 1981 that the US players had to pay their own expenses to the world championships and played the event without a coach.
That said, the 2011 US men’s team deserves full credit for being the first squad in 28 years to match the results of those early 1980’s teams.
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