THE MERRY (BUSY) MONTH OF MAY

SquashTalk's Bronstein suffers the penalty of sloppy syntax. Photo © 2006, Martin Bronstein.

This month’s Gallery is a bit late because  May started off in a hectic fashion. 

First a train up to Liverpool, Lime Street Station and then a short walk across the road to the Holiday Inn.  Alan Thatcher’s first  Liverpool tournament was ideal for everybody: the station, the hotel and the venue  were all within 100 yard radius. Perfect. We had wireless facilities for our computers and a press room big enough to put in another squash court. The players didn’t have to wait around for buses or taxis to take them to the venue and could nip back to the hotel and shower immediately after their match.

The venue, St. George’s Hall, was really quite magnificent, even better than Boston’s Symphony Hall. Like all things British, the building had been neglected  while the looney left was in power and thought it fun to destroy all things built by the hated capitalists, but is now undergoing refurbishment to a very high standard.

Although the crowds were disappointing this year – first years are the hardest -  next year should be far better.  Considering the Liverpool civil servants didn’t get around to signing the contract with Thatcher until February of this year, SquashUK  did well to get the tournament organized in just eight weeks.

One of the interesting aspects of the building were the prison cells in the basement. Alan Thatcher lost no time in using these for  journalists who wrote unkind things or
were guilty of sloppy syntax. (see Picture)

A LONG WAY TO COME TO GET VERBALLY ABUSED

Squash Referee Bahareh Karagah. Photo © 2006, Martin Bronstein.

It was a nice surprise to meet a demure young woman  who had flown all the way from Iran to help with the marking and refereeing in Liverpool.   Bahareh Karagah was a keen player in Iran until asthma put paid to oncourt activities. She was determined to stay in the game and started to take referee’s courses.  So keen is she that she pays her own way to various European venues to mark and learn by watching World Level referees in action. Fortunately she had veteran of world squash  Tony Parker giving her good advice and while she only marked the major matches, during the amateur finals on Saturday she referee’d and marked.  She did well and is a welcome addition to the global squash family.

THE WONDERFUL PIPE ORGAN
As I may have noted in my reports, the Hall had this magnificent pipe organ, several stories high. My ambition is to play one of these huge beasts and sing “Onward Christian Soldiers” in Yiddish. They wouldn’t give me the keys.

BEST SUPER SERIES YET

The Grand Liverpool Venue. Photo © 2006, Fritz Borchert.

Once the final was over on Sunday, with David Palmer once again losing in a final to the victorious come-from-behind Thierry Lincou, we had no rest. Monday morning we were on the train down to, strangely Liverpool Street station in London’s financial district – known as The City.  The Super Series Finals at Broadgate Arena attracted  near-capacity crowds from the first day and the competition was fierce. In previous years I always had a tiny suspicious that the players were only there for the money, but this year there were some evidence of a real desire to win from all the players. It was a pity that some of them had not gotten over their exertions in Liverpool and were unable to play at full capacity.  I hope the scheduling problem is solved next year so that the players have a week to rest up before tackling the Super Series.

TIME FOR A CHANGE (1)
Come on WSF, PSA WISPA, wake up, damn you wake up! It’s time to change our outmoded  refeering system.  Four times in the last few months I have seen results affected by outrageously bad decisions at critical junctures of the match, made by referee’s sitting  30 yards from the action at the front wall.  Each time I got angry – and I was just a writer…just think how the player felt, with his livelihood at stake.

These are not bad referees, just  humans who make mistakes. It is time to  do something about it, time to change the system so there is an appeal procedure  so that very bad decisions can be reversed or nullified.

SUGGESTION ONE: Use the American system of a referee and two linesmen. The referee sits at the back in the middle with one linesman by the back wall, left side, and the second on the right wall. The objections usually are  a) it’s American and nothing good is American, and 2) the players will appeal every decision. So what? How long does it take to appeal ?  Maybe 30 seconds at the most.  Let us remember in tennis and badminton, they have at least six line judges to assist the main official. Surely squash can handle three? And let us make the marker redundant.  The main advantage of the three-man system is that it prevents a player getting into a head on collision with the referee – as happened at Broadgate between Lee Beachill  and Dean Clayton. If the ref and two linesman agree on a decision, it is very difficult for a player to argue with three official all of whom had different views of the action.

SUGGESTION TWO: Retain the present system, but have the match (chief) referee sitting in a booth with the Horizon people who are putting out closed circuit tv with monitors for the audience. Adrian Battersby is getting  good at instant replays – he does it after almost every rally and you can see the audience looking at the replays to see what really happened. Simply have walkie-talkie communication between Referee and match referee, and if a player appeals, the decision is left to the booth where the match referee can watch the replay as many times as necessary to come to a conclusion. If there is still doubt that the referee was wrong, then stay with the initial decision.

If Christian Leighton of the WSF is reading this, I would be happy to come to the WSF  AGM in South Africa this year to present a paper to your delegates. No charge for my services, just air fare and hotel.

DEADLY DOUBLES (TIME FOR  A CHANGE, 2)
While everybody agrees that the singles squash at the Commonwealth Games was superb in every way (tv coverage got rave reviews from every one who saw it) the doubles – Men’s, Women and mixed was roundly condemned as being boring and the term “like watching paint dry” was used freely.  This is not Americn doubles, on a large court with a hard ball. This is the official world doubles, using a soft ball on a court that is four feet wider than a singles court.  This is simply not challenging enough for elite players. Andrew Shelley of WISPA tells me rallies were averaging  four minutes. One game  in the final took 60 minutes and the final took a mind-numbing 2 ½ hours to complete.

Greg Hutchings, one time manager of Jansher Khan and the Melbourne Squash Competition manager commented: “Basically, the current format is not challenging enough for the world’s top ranked players, thus creating potentially long and boring matches.”

Steven Line, writing in Squashplayer Magazine  said “…the doubles, which ran over six stultifying days, was a huge disappointment.  With enormous  television and press coverage this was a golden opportunity for squash to showcase itself on the world stage. Unfortunately the best it could come up with was a game  of undiscernible tactics where interminable rallies are often won by lucky nicks or the ball hitting an out-of-position opponent.  ….I implore  the powers within squash never to run this event again…”

Strong words from the usually unflappable Steve.

So, what are the solutions? I have one very simple solution. Give the players a pair of goggles and an American doubles (hard ball). That will speed up the action and cut down on the length of the rallies.  Also reduce doubles to best of three games,  not five.

Steve Line suggests lowering the tin to 10 inches.  But this would mean squash has three standards: 19 inch tin for women, 17 inch for PSA and 10 inch for doubles.
 I came up with a  more radical solution.  The ball, once in play, cannot touch the floor. So you get volley doubles. How’s that for a test of speed and athleticism?

Do you have a suggestion on how softball doubles can be improved?  Email it to me at Squashtalk and the best suggestion will received  a squash DVD.

USSRA, REMIND YOUR STAFF ABOUT FREE SPEECH
Ron Beck  thought that a USSRA selection event was played on a bad date and wrote to that effect.  Michael Puertas, Under 23 development manager  for the USSRA, was really very upset and sent Beck a dismaying email; It read in full:

Dear Ronald,

We are sending out reports and pictures from the selection event here in
Cleveland, but as your reports are late going up and have a negative spin
they have decided to send it to xxxxxxx as they will put a positive
report immediatly.

Many Thanks
Mike Puertas

This sort of news management has been part of every despicable dictatorship since the dawn of newspapers and is being practiced  now in the Republic of China where any journalist who writes ‘negative’ reports goes to jail.  The words ‘positive spin” fills me with loathing and disgust.  The job of the press is not to spin, but report events as they see it. We are not here to serve, or market or help or any other of those euphemistic terms that squash organizations use to  mask their desires to  put out ‘positive’  stories.

Now Pertuas represents the USSRA as a national coach, which is a US public nonprofit corporation. This sort of censorship is simply unacceptable to those organizations and is almost certainly unacceptable to the 8,000 Americans who are members of the USSRA. 

This issue now appears, a week later, to be fully resolved with the USSRA but as a long time professional journalist, I am still concerned about lack of understanding of the role of the media on the part of some individual people placed in positions of squash authority in the US.

And as a final note: the UK website that puts up everything “immediatly” (SIC) with a positive spin, had still not posted the results a week later.