Booth Keys Tight US Junior Win over Singapore
Aug 26, 2004, By Rob Dinerman; SquashTalk Independent News Service © 2004;

[medal draw/results]     [team pool results]

Displaying the tenacity and resilience that has emerged as a trademark of this squad as the World Junior Championships have evolved, the U. S. Junior men earned a hard-fought and exciting comeback 2-1 victory over Singapore this afternoon in the quarter-final round of the Plate portion of the Team tournament. Coach Mike Calloway's crew will now take on a tough Switzerland contingent that wiped out Iran, three matches to love, in their corresponding quarter-final.

What made today's win so praiseworthy was the potentially devastating backdrop of Tuesday's heartbreaking 2-1 loss in the meet with Malaysia the winning of which would have qualified the U. S. for a spot in the Championship flight, whose draw was limited to the top 12 Pool competition finishers. Both that disappointing outcome (in which Chris Gordon won the opening match at No. 1, only to have Joe Raho and Garnett Booth lose, in five games in Booth's case) and a similar 2-1 loss to England prior to Malaysia might well have broken the spirit of the American squad.
This seemed especially pertinent when the match with Singapore developed in a manner that eerily resonated the England and Malaysia meets, with Gordon yet again initiating matters with a victory (in straight games), but Joe Raho showing the wear and tear of 13 nearly consecutive days of competition throughout which he competed strongly yet had very few wins to show for his efforts.

In today's match he was clearly off his game, and, as had happened against both England and Malaysia, he bowed in three games to Richard Hill.

This meant that for the third team meet in a row, the final result hinged on what happened in the last match of the day. And for the second straight time the American on the firing line was Garnett Booth, who as a Harvard freshman this past winter contributed several crucial victories to the Crimson's march to the Ivy League title and to within a single match of a Potter Cup final-round upset win over five-time defending champion Trinity. Booth had sat out the England match due to illness, and against Malaysia he had saved match-balls against him at 4-8 in the fourth and won that game in a tiebreaker, only to be too drained to really contest the 9-0 fifth.

Determined to redeem this enervating defeat but trailing two games to one against Singapore's Kenneth Chan, Booth forged a 6-1 lead in the fourth, held off a late Chan rally to seal that equalizing game 9-6, and this time had both the strength and resolve to make this momentum stick by rolling unstoppably through the 9-3 clinching fifth game.

It is a sign of the maturity and competitive ardor of this U. S. team that, rather than throwing in the towel after being stymied in their initial goal of making the top-12 Championship flight, its members instead created a secondary goal, i.e. winning the Plate competition and thereby finishing No. 13 overall, and today they were able to take a big step in attaining precisely that mission.

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