Suzie Pierrepont And Narelle Krizek Capture 2015 Turner Cup by Rob Dinerman Dateline January 25th
--- Faced with a surging Cinderella opponent midway through a fourth
game that had grown very close and somewhat contentious, top seeds
Suzie Pierrepont and Narelle Krizek responded to the exigencies of the
moment like the champions they are by engineering an unstoppable 9-1
match-closing run to clinch a 15-11 10-15 15-10 15-8 victory over
qualifiers Natalie Grainger and Kayley Leonard this afternoon in the
final round of the $20,000 Turner Cup benefiting Squash Haven, held
this year at the Westchester Country Club in Rye, NY. Pierrepont and
Krizek thus won this title for the third time and second in a row, in
the process extending their consecutive-tournaments-won streak to 10,
their last loss having come 32 months ago at the hands of Steph Hewitt
and Meredeth Quick in the final round of the 2012 edition of this
championship.
Krizek and Pierrepont, who have played together for the
past six years, had dominated their pair of pre-final opponents (namely
qualifiers Jenny Duncalf and Rachael Grinham, followed by Vic Simmonds
and Amanda Sobhy), while by contrast first-time partners Grainger, a
Turner Cup winner with Sobhy in 2009 (when they straight-gamed
Pierrepont/Krizek in the final) and 2013, and the Harvard-bound
Greenwich Academy senior Leonard had weathered a pair of five-gamers
(including their quarterfinal upset of Quick and Hewitt) on Friday as
well as two other close 3-1 en route to this Sunday summit. These
differing pathways aside, Grainger and her young southpaw teammate
rebounded from an early 6-2 first-game deficit and crept to 11-12
before Krizek, courageously ignoring the three tins she had hit in the
previous four points, successfully went for broke first on a forehand
roll-corner from the back wall that Leonard wasn’t looking for, and
then on a razor-sharp reverse-corner that made the score 14-11,
following which an emboldened Pierrepont nestled a backhand drop shot
from deep in the court that died in front of Leonard.
Undeterred by the disappointing ending to that game --- as
they had been all weekend whenever adversity confronted them ---
Grainger and Leonard responded with a much more efficient second game
in which Grainger, looking much swifter than she had in the
Saturday-afternoon four-game semi vs. Carrie Hastings and Tarsh
McElhinny, made the most of her opportunities, Leonard got better width
on her cross-courts and surprised Krizek several times (including at
game-ball) with cross-drops into the front-right corner, and both of
them benefited by a slight downturn in the Pierrepont/Krizek quality of
play. Pierrepont is great at holding optimum position with her reach
and power, but she sometimes lays back a bit, making her vulnerable to
front-left salvos, especially when they are coming from someone as
capable as Grainger, and Krizek clipped the top of the tin three times
in the last eight points of that 15-10 equalizing game.
But in both the first half of the third game (when they
charged from 0-2 to 7-3) and, as noted, the last half of the fourth,
Krizek and Pierrepont simply imposed their superior firepower and
teamwork to a degree that commandeered the on-court dynamics and
enabled them to inexorably build up their advantage, both territorially
and statistically. Though she coped remarkably well throughout the
match and indeed throughout the weekend with the pressure that her two
far-more-experienced opponents relentlessly exerted, Leonard
increasingly found her self under siege and driven further and further
back in the court (at least two-thirds of the Pierrepont/Krizek attack
was directed her way during those last two games), leaving the
front-left open for Krizek’s nick-finding three-walls and severe
cross-drops, while Grainger, forced to “push the envelope,” committed a
few errors and twice was driven so far into the middle that Krizek was
thereby able to whistle forehand drives down the vacated right wall.
That the match’s fourth and final game was the 22nd of the
tournament for Leonard and Grainger (actually, the 26th for Grainger,
who had also played in the Greenwich Open singles, where she had lost
in four hard-fought games to just-crowned Tournament of Champions
winner Raneem El Welily) and only the 10th for Pierrepont/Krizek may
have played a role as well. But ultimately the Pierrepont/Krizek sprint
to the tape --- which concluded with a scrambled point at the end of
which Krizek, finding herself less than three feet from the front wall
near the right corner with no one anywhere near her, nudged a little
drop shot that neither Leonard nor Grainger even moved for --- was more
a matter of the best team in the WDSA field compellingly asserting
itself at crunch-time over an opponent that nevertheless had a
tremendously praiseworthy five-match performance in its own right and
fully deserved the plaudits it received afterwards for making this
tournament a truly memorable occasion.
