Commonwealth
Games 2002:
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2002 Commonwealth Games - Doubling Up
by Joe and Dan Kneipp, August 1 2002

[last update was 9-aug-02 ]

Player Perspective
with

Joe and Dan Kneipp

Doubles Action Get underway in Manchester (Ryding and Razik in foreground) (photo © 2002 Fritz Borchert)

With the conclusion of the singles event the doubles have finally started.

The atmosphere of the Commonwealth Games is incredible, but when you play single squash for a living it’s very hard to spend over a week sitting around cheering and supporting players that you’d prefer to be on court vying for medals against.

For the first time in my life I have some sympathy and understandings for how the US 100 metre sprint athletes must feel. The Commonwealth Games for most sports aren’t as competitive as the Olympics. Obviously there are still world records being broken and some athletes are going to win regardless of who they are competing against (Ian Thorpe being the most obvious example). But other sports like Gymnastics don’t have the same standard without countries like Russian, US, Germany and China in the competition.

This brings me to the US Olympic 100metre sprinters. It doesn’t matter how fast you are there are quotas on the number of athletes per country. So you may be the twelfth fastest sprinter in the world, but if five other US sprinters are faster than that, you just won’t make the Olympic team. If you competed for any other country you’d be the national champion and perhaps even make the sprint final, but you can’t make your home team if the country is particularly strong.

Squash in the Commonwealth Games is one of the few sports that are absolutely world class. There are only two players missing from the top fifteen and one of them is John White who is a Commonwealth athlete anyway (Aussie with Scottish tendencies). Unfortunately this elite competition means that I am in a similar situation to a US sprinter. The men’s singles was a 64 draw. Ten players had first round byes so there were 54 athletes competing. Of those 54 athletes I have a higher world ranking than 39 of them. If I was able to compete I would have been the 16th seed. But unfortunately for me four of the other Aussies in the team are all ranked better than 16. With strict quotas of a maximum of four athletes per country I was forced to sit out.

As you can imagine this was very frustrating. But this has meant I have had to put my efforts and concentration into the mixed doubles with my partner Robin Cooper. Robin has been off the tour for awhile but still possessed spectacular racquet skills, which are most important in doubles.

Doubles squash is closer to a game of racquetball than to normal singles squash. It’s very fast with little chance to wear a player out physically. Instead of the calculating rallies that you can have in singles that can have both players tearing into all corners, doubles is more about fast racquet skills and forcing a mistake from the opponent. Because the men hit the ball harder and faster than the women this usually means that both teams concentrate most of their shots towards the opposite female player.

On average during a mixed game I would estimate that only 15% of the balls are hit by the men. It becomes a frantic hitting match between the two girls. The male players walk off the court virtually as fresh as a daisy, while the women are tired and worn out. When the male player eventually does hit the ball there is a greater pressure on trying to put the ball away.

Most of the girls don’t cover the court as quickly as the men (notice I’ve said most – some are unbelievably fast). So on the rare occasion that you get a shot that isn’t at smash at your body, you try to create a winner out of it – usually towards the girl’s side. It’s easy to go for too much and hit a tin. So your confidence drops and you’re hesitant to attempt a winner the next time. This means that frequently the women are playing long rallies against each other up and down the wall with volley drops being played whenever possible, and the men mostly smashing cross courts at the women. It’s a completely different game!

It’s very exciting to finally be playing in the Commonwealth games for my country and having a chance to get a medal. I was leaving the squash centre with Paul Price today when we walked past the medal dais. I had to step onto the gold medal podium and feel what it would be like to be looking down from it. The view is great from there and I just need to work on having a medal around my neck and the Aussie anthem blaring out loud.

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