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Hyder Open - Semis
by
Rob Dinerman © 2002 SquashTalk
May
19, 2002 © 2002
Seeds Reach Hyder Cup Men's And Women's Finals
Englishman Julian Wellings and Canadian Katie Patrick won hard-fought four-game semi-final matches this evening to reach the final round of the 34th annual Quentin Hyder Invitational, headquartered as it has been for several years at the New York Athletic Club, where the first edition of this tournament took place on narrow courts in 1969.
The 30-year-old Wellings, who was ranked as high as No. 48 in the world as recently as two years ago, has been based in Cincinnati since this past November, and he defeated his compatriot and virtual contemporary Clive Leach, 15-6 13-15 15-3 15-11 in a match that featured wild swings in momentum and consumed 75 entertaining minutes.
His final-round opponent tomorrow afternoon will be third seed Damien Mudge, who won his semi-final against the second-seeded host club assistant pro Kerim Yehia when the latter had to default midway through the third game due to a muscle pull he sustained in mid-second game that eventually became too painful and immobilizing for him to continue.
Patrick will face Julia Beaver, the three-time Intercollegiate champion who graduated from Princeton last year, but for whom the Hyder was her first tournament appearance after being forced to miss the entire 2001-2002 season due to medical problems from which she has happily fully recovered. After handily dismissing Blair Clark in three decisive games in her quarter-final opener last night, Beaver faced Julie Lilien, who had upset the second seed Brigitte Jensen in her first round. Lilien has a gritty game based on her much-improved conditioning, and throughout her Beaver semi she displayed her scrambling skills and determination. Beaver's understandable ring rust and occasional frustration with her opponent's ubiquity evidenced itself in a number of impatient and unforced tins, especially on her drop shots, but her superior reach and leverage were telling factors in her 9-6, 4 and 2 victory.
She gets good torque on her backhand rails and crosscourts and her impressive wing span enabled her to cut off many of Lilien's passing attempts, particularly during a dominant third and final game. She figures to be severely challenged by Patrick in tomorrow's final, which is scheduled to begin at the NYAC at 12:45, with the men's final to follow.
Patrick, who played for American legend Demer Holleran at Penn and starred on the Quaker squad that gave the school its first-ever Intercollegiate team championship two years ago, has excellent range and fitness, volleys aggressively and has gained valuable experience this season playing in and often through the qualifying brackets on the demanding WISPA pro women's circuit. Her 9-5 9-4 6-9 9-6 semi-final win over the dogged Olga Sola of Spain was a testament to the all-around squash skills of both women. Sola led 3-0 in the second game and 6-4 in the fourth, but in each game she bent before the upgraded tempo that Patrick was able to generate.
Like Lilien, Sola is a good competitor, but in the end both were out-classed by the athleticism and talent of their opponents, which should make for a good match-up in tomorrow's final between this pair of tall and graceful protagonists. Both of the men's semis were defined by the quarter-finals that took place earlier in the day, as often occurs when both of these rounds take place only hours apart.
Yehia went a long five games against Kiwi Daniel Sharplin, a well-conditioned grinder who barely succumbed in a match that lasted well over an hour and probably left Yehia vulnerable to the mishap that doomed his aspirations of beating Mudge, who had overpowered Richard Chin in a much less depleting three games in his quarter-final. Yehia eked out a close first game and trailed 8-6 in the second prior to his left-thigh injury, following which he dropped the remainder of that 15-6 game and all but one of the nine points that were played in the fourth before Yehia acknowledged the inevitable and retired.
Leach led Imran Khan two games to love but was eventually pressed to a fifth game, which may have played a role in his somewhat sluggish performance against Wellings, especially in the first and third games, neither of which he contested once it was clear that he had fallen too far behind to catch up. Leach almost let a 14-10 second-game advantage slip away before salvaging the stanza with a forehand rail that Wellings mistakenly thought would come off the back wall and therefore failed to cut off in mid-court, which he had the opportunity to do. From 7-3 in the third, Wellings ran the game out, then continued this streak to 8-0 in the fourth, 16 consecutive points and seemingly curtains.
But Leach is a former world No. 26 who demonstrated the continuing excellence of his game by winning the Hartford Open last December and defeating former world No. 2 Brett Martin in the final. Perhaps as importantly, he has a big margin in his career rivalry with Wellings and this psychological edge seemed to emerge especially in the mid-game rally he engineered that brought him from 5-10 to 11-10.
Wellings was starting to lose the composure that had brought him to 2-1, 8-0, tinning and arguing after a few close referee's calls went against him. It was at this point that the season-long concentration on doubles that enabled Leach and his partner Blair Horler to become the fourth-ranked team on the recently-concluded 17-event ISDA pro tour may have cost Leach the opportunity to rescue the match, as he donated three semi-forced tins to Wellings's five-point match-winning streak. Two of them were on drop shots that would fallen for winners had they not barely caught the top of the telltale.
Reprieved by these developments, Wellings ended the match on a forehand drop shot of his own at 14-11 that was too tight for Leach to scrape it back into play. Ironically both Leach and Yehia, who paid for their five-game quarter-final struggles in their subsequent semi-final losses, had been beneficiaries of the same phenomenon in their quarter-final victories, in Leach's case because of the manner in which Francis Odeh had pushed Khan all the way to 15-13 in the fifth game Friday night and in Yehia's case due to the marathon round-of-16 five-gamer between Sharplin and Dan Ezra, who in fact led that match two games to one before grudging ceding the final two games.
Saturday
Recap
Men's Qtrs:
Wellings d Quick, 3-1;
Leach d I. Khan, 3-2;
Mudge d Chin, 3-0;
Yehia d Sharplin, 3-2.
Semis:
Wellings d Leach, 3-1;
Mudge d Yehia, 1-1, 8-1 retired.
Women's Semis:
Patrick d Sola, 3-1;
Beaver d Lilien, 3-0.
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