Kneipp Entertains His Way to the Semis
By Colin McQuillan for SquashTalk

Nov 13 2002 from BCE Place Toronto

John White was the first victim of the bruising six hour night at BCE Place, losing
the first quarter-final of the session 6-15 7-15 15-12 15-13 15-10 in 87 minutes to Joe Kneipp, the unseeded Amsterdam based world number 13 from Australia, who earlier removed the sixth seeded Lee Beachill of England. This was a monumental win for Kneipp, who has been knocking on the door for the past several events and has now duplicated his semi-final berth earned in Boston last January.

Just as he did against Beachill in the quarters, Kneipp produced a sparkling fifth game at the end of an exhausting encounter to steal the result. Kneipp, who has spent many hours on the practice court with White, has long predicted his ability to beat White in tournament conditions, and has finally made good on that forecast.

WHITE STARTS OUT ON THE ATTACK
Half an hour into the match and two games down, Kneipp appeared to have little chance of victory against the big hitting Australian born Scot. "There isn't a lot you can do with John when he is seeing the ball and is fresh enough to hit power shots at the nick to end every rally," Kneipp admitted after the quarter-final. "You just have to hang in there and keep things rolling for as long as you can in hopes that he will lose the edge a bit."

Of course, if you can bring a bit of good humoured distraction into play as well, it can help the cause. Kneipp may turn out to be the best Australian chatty disrupter of an opponent's concentration since the all-talking, all-dancing, all-laughing performances of Dean Williams back in the 1980s.

Having deliberately slowed the pace of the rallying and raised the trajectory of the ball to encourage White into his favourite but increasingly expensive thunderous kill-making attack, Kneipp chased down everything in the third game that did not actually land in the nick or the tin and, over the course of 18 hard running minutes, pulled a game out of the bag.

The physical cost was evident as he slipped 4-7 and 5-9 behind in the fourth. But extended conversations, first with referee Mike Riley and then with the spectators in the front row, as to whether two let calls after he had made four successive miraculous interceptions were right or wrong, then with his opponent over a number of following incidents, seduced White into a joke-filled exhibitionist period at the end of which the score had transformed to 9-9.

DISCOURSE ACHIEVES GOAL
"These decisions are not made by committee," Riley told the players, but Kneipp was not arguing for a decision. He just wanted the entertainment value. White hit his way to 13-11, but a brace of his massively tinned errors followed by a delicate dropshot to either hand from Kneipp suddenly brought the game score level.

"I should know better than to let him get me talking," White said after the match. "I lost my concentration even though I knew he was only talking because he could not think of another option. Then he got his own act together for the fifth game and I could not stop him."

FIFTH GAME BEARTRAP
Against Beachill in the first round Kneipp collected 13 fifth game points in two hands against an increasingly dispirited opponent. This time he went only to 6-2 in his first two hands, although he might have advanced further had referee Riley not become a mite miserly with his penalty stroke calls, but that was enough of a lead to bring the necessary edge of frustration into White's powerful striking of the ball.

The Scottish number one got as close as 9-11 but three resounding tinned errors, two of them in the last two rallies, sounded his death knell.

"I just played percentage squash at the end," Kneipp explained. "Actually the match against Beachill was tougher because the rallies lasted much longer. You know with John that the big hit is going to come in sooner rather than later and, if things are going the right way, he will put a lot of them into the tin."

"It was lucky that the tournament format gave me a rest day after the first round.

ICE TIME
The top seeded defending champion, Peter Nicol of England, had to have
manipulation and ice on his ankle after fighting through 71 highly mobile
minutes to get past Rodney Durbach, the South African qualifier, 15-8 16-17
15-8 15-12.

"I thought when it happened in the England National Squash League last Tuesday I might be out for a long time. But I have very flexible ligaments and within a couple of days the swelling went down.

"Treatment started on Thursday, twice a day: mobilisation and ultrasound and pulse treatment and acupuncture. I was on crutches on Thursday, still not too confident I'd make it. That morning physio started. I walked out of physio on Thursday afternoon. By Friday morning, I was walking normally and by Saturday I was hitting. By Sunday evening I seemed 100 per cent.

"But tonight it was a bit sore at the start and by the last game it was really painful. I could really have done without Rodney fighting back so well in the second game and clinching that last point for the game."

ONG VICTIM OF REFEREEING FREE FOR ALL
His semi-final opponent, third seeded Stewart Boswell of Australia, didn't much enjoy the 74 minutes he spent with Ong Beng Hee in the last quarter-final of the session, but at least he went home with the 15-11 9-15 15-6 15-13 win. The young Malaysian was on the wrong end of a series of refereeing gaffes from Toronto's Mo Shehata that certainly deprived him of the fourth game and arguably interfered with an important five game result against the in-form world number four.

Ong Beng Hee appears to have emerged from a dull run since he won the Asian Games title for Malaysia. He told SquashTalk today that he has changed his training away from repetitive session work to revisit the more free attacking style that originally took him to the world junior title. That showed in his dismissal of Paul Price from the first round on Sunday and it was obvious in the way he took the second game tonight and fought through 2-3, 6-6 10-10 and 12-12 in the fourth against the sleepy determination of
the referee to prevent him reaching a fifth game decider.

At least five times Mr Shehata interpreted interference between the two tiring players unfairly against the young Malaysian. Two penalty strokes, at 13-12 and more crucially at 15-13, went to Boswell, a couple of let calls seemed to reverse reality and a no-let decision for 10-8 to the Australian was simply inexplicable : "You were holding your opponent," the referee told Ong Beng Hee, who in fact seemed to be preventing the stumbling Australian from sprawling to the floor after being forced away from the ball.

Mr Shehata himself looked pretty shell shocked at the end, although the inexplicable referee rules that prevented him from speaking to the press meant the public received no explanation for his decisions. Ong Beng Hee, normally the most placid and amicable of players, was moved to shout in fury at the last call, to ask the official at one point if he was running the match this way out of personal dislike, and finally to complain to the tournament organiser, John Nimick.

"It just makes it so hard," he said. "I have been getting closer to Stewart in our last few matches and I really though this might be the time for a breakthrough against him. I thought I did enough to take that fourth game, but you cannot beat a player like Stewart if the referee is going to keep depriving you of points."

POWER LETS RACKET DO THE TALKING
Ironically, earlier in the evening Mr Shehata made a pretty good job of handling Jonathon Power's 85 minute 11-15 15-7 15-12 15-11 win over England's Mark Chaloner. He was strong and quick with no-let calls on nudging little advances into the front court but flexible enough to keep the action rolling.

Power, the second seeded local hero playing in front of his adoring home crowd, was mostly content to let his racket do the talking against Chaloner, the world number 10, who took the opening game with an enterprising and unusually thoughtful front court attack but, once the Canadian took over the front court, was unable to progress in the same vein through the rest of the match.

"I sort of went to sleep a bit when he took the front and I was just chasing stuff around," Chaloner admitted. "By the time I woke up again he had things pretty much under control. I should have kept thinking and trying to work the ball against him. Those little nudges drive you mad though.

"I am playing really well again and I think I am only a few points off the leading guys. I keep getting Power and Dave Palmer in the early rounds and they are probably the worst two players top meet while they are still fresh early in the week."

Power would certainly have been expecting another challenge from Scotland's fourth seeded John White in the semi-finals and the arrival of the man who put him out of the Qatar Classic quarter-finals last time they met would have been more than a touch stressful.

YMG Capital Canadian Squash Classic
Toronto, Canada

Quarter-final Results:

Peter Nicol (Eng) bt Rodney Durbach (RSA) 15-8 16-17 15-8 15-12
Stewart Boswell (Aus) bt Ong Beng Hee (Mal) 15-11 9-15 15-6 15-13
Joe Kneipp (Aus) bt John White (Scot) 6-15 7-15 15-12 15-13 15-10
John Power (Can) bt Mark Chaloner (Eng) 11-15 15-7 15-12 15-11