Hyder Cup Final: Hisham Ashour Charges To Comeback Victory Over Cuskelly
by Rob Dinerman
Dateline May 5th --- Unfocused, tin-prone and thoroughly out-played throughout the first two games and at the outset of the third as well, second seed Hisham Ashour conjured up a remarkable out-of-the-blue run of extended brilliance that accounted for SEVENTEEN unanswered points and launched him to an 8-11 5-11 11-3 11-5 11-5 victory over fourth seed Ryan Cuskelly Sunday afternoon in the milestone 45th edition of the Quentin Hyder Cup at the Sports Club/LA in mid-town Manhattan. In so doing, Ashour reversed the trajectory of his last match with Cuskelly (who had similarly rallied from love-two and a third-game deficit when the two met in the 2009 Canadian Open) and completed an Ashour family sweep of the major New York City pro squash tournaments in the wake of his younger brother Ramy’s triumph this past January at the Tournament Of Champions in Grand Central Station.
As noted, it was all Cuskelly early on, as he displayed the same toughness and relentless retrieving ability that had keyed his pre-final wins over Julian Illingworth in the quarters and Jaymie Haycocks in the semis. His willingness, indeed eagerness, to keep his nose to the grindstone and to make Ashour always hit one more ball, visibly frustrated the latter and likely played a role in a string of Ashour tins late in the first game and midway through the second that accounted for each of those stanzas landing in the Cuskelly column. Ashour showed only transitory flashes of his racquet skill during that period, and when he fell behind 3-1 in the opening stages of the third game as well, he appeared right on the brink of falling permanently out of contention.
It was at this juncture that he nailed an overhead into the front-left nick, followed by a tin-defying drop shot winner and a mis-direction forehand drive to perfect length. Suddenly the spark was back in his eyes and, more importantly, in his game, as he powered his way to balls up front, getting there in time to position his feet early enough to give him a multitude of options, on all of which he was executing flawlessly. Cuskelly was now on the defensive, several times having his serve-returns responded to with winners, a highly deflating turn given how hard Cuskelly himself had had to work for his own winners. Hot as a pistol, Ashour ran out the third and raced to a 7-0 lead in the fourth that effectively gave him that game as well. Cuskelly actually won five of six points to close the score to 5-8, but Ashour, fooled on a ball down the middle, somehow hit an instinctive behind-the-back winner that blunted Cuskelly’s comeback effort.
Two points later (the last a discouraged-looking serve-return tin), the Hyder final was going to a fifth game for the fifth time in the last seven years – three of those fifth games had been decided by two points (Wael El Hindi 11-9 over Shahier Razik in 2007, Illingworth 11-9 over Yasser El-Halaby in 2008 and Alister Walker 16-14 over Razik in 2011) and a year ago El Hindi had had to face down four fourth-game match-balls against him before rescuing that game 13-11 and eventually defeating Razik, 11-7 in the fifth. But in none of those cases had any of the players entered the fifth game on the kind of roll that was impelling Ashour’s game this afternoon. He sharp-shot his way to a quick 3-0 lead (a 6-0 run going back to the end of the fourth) and from 5-4 took off on yet another, this time match-clinching 5-0 skein characterized by near-ethereal imagination and a combination of deception, spin and deadly placement the likes of which, really over the last three games, may never have been seen in the history of this tournament. Cuskelly was for the most part hanging in the points with admirable gutsiness, but he was under siege and, by the end, he lost track of some balls that he would have easily returned earlier on, including misjudging a forehand working-boast that died at the edge of his racquet and put Ashour ahead 10-4. The latter then tinned a backhand drive, a momentary reminder of his early-match woes yet startling on this occasion for the blemish-free perfection that had marked his rally. On the next point he guided a severely-angled forehand cross-drop that a lunging Cuskelly thought he had scraped back into play, only to have the officials properly call the ball down, an anticlimactic conclusion to what was nevertheless a masterpiece performance by Ashour, one that had the huge gallery shaking its collective head in wonderment and admiration.
The Hyder weekend has become a celebration/culmination of the New York Squash season, and this year it was punctuated by a turnout for the nine amateur flights (nine men and five women) that, combined with the Professional event (main-draw and qualifying), resulted in a total of 228 participants, smashing the previous record of 212. Overall, 2012-13 has been a banner year for the metropolitan-NY Association, in terms of league play (singles and doubles) and tournament participation. This year, for the first time, the Hyder weekend had an Open doubles tournament as well, with Josh Schwartz and Hamed Anvari winning the men’s event and Toby Ehre and Jennifer Coxe the women’s. Much credit for the success of this Hyder tournament (the finals of which were attended by the great man himself, now 83, who has never missed a holding of the event he started almost as a lark back in 1969) goes to New York Squash president Jessica Green and longtime Tournament Director Corey Modeste.
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