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.
