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Pohrer Wins Grashopper after trip to Zurich Police Station
Tops Vanessa Atkinson after disappointing US Open

By Rob Dinerman © 2002 SquashTalk; all rights of reproduction reserved.
Nov 30, 2002             

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Pohrer aims higher for 2003 (photo © 2002 Debra Tessier)

When Natalie Pohrer defeated second seed and defending
champion Vanessa Atkinson in this final of the $ 25,000 Grasshopper Cup in Zurich this past Sunday afternoon, she thereby fulfilled her top-seeded status, redeemed her losses both to Atkinson in their last meeting early in the British Open this past spring and to Tania Bailey in the quarter-finals of the Weymuller U. S. Open nine days ago, consolidated what has clearly been the best year of her professional career and notched her first WISPA title since announcing her change of national affiliation from England to the United States earlier this fall.

The only blot upon what was otherwise a sparkling four-day performance for the 25-year-old Pohrer was the tendency she exhibited throughout the last two rounds to have one lapse per match in her otherwise focused concentration.

This situation had cost her dearly in the Bailey match in
Brooklyn, in which she had tinned frequently and generally played raggedly especially during the last two games of her four-game defeat to a player she had conquered in each of their three prior 2002 meetings. Pohrer advanced to the semis via a pair of straight-game wins over qualifier Kim Hannes and unseeded Pamela Nimmo, who was slightly drained after engineering a four-game first-round upset of fifth seed Fiona Geaves. The latter was unable in this Switzerland tournament to duplicate the form that had created a first-round Weymuller win one week earlier over her British compatriot Rebecca Macree, who rebounded strongly from that loss with wins over a pair of youngsters, namely Shelley Kitchen of New Zealand and then Madeline Perry of Ireland.
For Perry, this tournament was nonetheless an important breakthrough. After coming close and just falling short several times this season, she used her pair of qualifying wins as a launching pad to the big win her career needed, and from a two-game deficit at that, over the fourth-seeded Englishwoman Steph Brind. A Brind-Macree quarter-final match-up would have been a same-round repeat of their contentious battle at last season's Weymuller, which even involved an exchange of shoves at mid-court between points. Brind had saved a few game-balls against her in the fourth and last
game of that match, but the fighting spirit she had displayed on that night in Grand Central Station nine months ago was nowhere to be found either in her listless and swift Weymuller defeat at Linda Charman's hands 12 days ago or in this Zurich tourney after the second game against Perry, who ironically had herself collapsed in a 9-0 second-game whitewashing after losing the first in a tiebreaker.

Perhaps satiated by that easy second-game outcome, Brind took the third game off and, as so often happens when one player lets up, she was subsequently unable to regain control. Seizing the opportunity her favored but sleep-walking opponent had given her, Perry sprinted exuberantly all the way through those final laps of her 8-10 0-9 9-0 9-6 9-3 victory, then battled the hard-nosed veteran Macree all the way, earning in fact a game-ball chance at 8-6 in the fourth and with the very real possibility of forcing a decisive fifth game before eventually ceding that game in a
tiebreaker.

While Pohrer and Macree were thus garnering the two available semi-final slots in the draw's top half, Rachael Grinham and Atkinson, the third and second seeds respectively, were forging their way down below to a rematch both of the 2002 Grasshopper Cup final and of their pulsating five-game epic in a Weymuller quarter-final just one week before. Grinham, who survived that eight-day-old thriller from 2-1 down by out-lasting and finally exhausting the seven-time Dutch champion, scythed her slashing way through qualifier Rebecca Chiu and the ageless and recent Ottawa tourney winner Suzanne Horner.

Atkinson was confronted with a tougher draw that required her to open against
the exceptionally talented and graceful Egyptian teenager Omneya Abdel Kawy,
who dropped two one-sided games before winning the third in a 10-8 tiebreaker
but losing the final fourth by the identical taut margin. Atkinson had seemed demoralized as well as greatly fatigued by the end of her 9-1 fifth-game loss to Grinham in Brooklyn, but in first edging out Kawy and then winning in five in her next round against Jenny Tranfield(a first-round victrix over Grinham's younger sister Natalie), she displayed an admirable degree of resiliency and an ability to bounce back from the Weymuller disappointment that would seem to augur well for the remainder of her career, which, given her 26 years and the fact that this has been her best season to date, should be about to enter its prime. These two pre-semis wins provided a solid springboard for her repechage with Rachael Grinham, who
was clearly struggling with her mobility and flexibility to a degree that was especially glaring in view of the fact that these are normally among her foremost traits.

After playing in increasing pain through an anti-climactic 9-5 first game defeat and then an even more downhill 9-2 second, the doughty Grinham had to retire with a back injury that a subsequent exam back in her current Cairo home base revealed was stemming from what has been diagnosed as a strained ligament. As of this writing at American Thanksgiving, Grinham is still in a considerable amount of discomfort, the relatively bland diagnosis notwithstanding, and plans, wisely in view of how important this area is to a squash player'' existence, to get a second medical opinion.

Fortunately, there is now a break in her schedule, and she will be able to give the
injury sufficient time to fully heal before getting back to serious training.
Though often over-matched physically, the 25-year-old dynamo is deservedly known as
an absolute gamer, and there is no doubt that she will return as good as ever
before too much longer.

For now, though, her withdrawal brought Atkinson to her second consecutive spot in the Grasshopper Cup final and a chance to defend the title she had won in a 3-0 win over Grinham last year. Both she and Pohrer were competing in their 12th career WISPA final, Atkinson's fourth this year and the seventh for Pohrer, whose performances all year have been superb.

One of the few exceptions to this skein, as noted, came at Atkinson's hands last
spring in the British Open, arguably the most prestigious title in the women's game, when Atkinson ousted her in five back-and-forth games in the round of 16 en route to her eventual advance all the way to the semis.

Perhaps overly chastened by that stumble, Pohrer began the final inauspiciously by tinning a 6-4 first-game advantage into a 9-6 defeat. But she had been steeled by a pair of 10-8 fifth-game wins over Rachael Grinham and Carol Owens that got her to the final of the World Open in Qatar three weeks earlier (before barely losing to Sara Fitz-Gerald, and further galvanized by an odd pre-tournament episode in Zurich early in the week when a misunderstanding about a round-trip tram ticket she had purchased resulted in an argument with a half-dozen ticket conductors who demanded in German that she fork over more money and then proceeded to take her to the police station when she courageously refused to do so.

Ushered into what Pohrer subsequently described as "the most picturesque police station I have ever seen"(not that she's been to many!), with beautiful arches adorned with lovely paintings, she finally got to discuss the matter in English with a police officer, who exonerated her and indeed remarked that had he been in the same situation, he wouldn't have paid the additional fare either. Vindicated by the favorable outcome of this unusual adventure, and with the most welcome support of her husband Eddie, who had flown over from St. Louis to cheer her on, Pohrer dominated the remaining three games of the 34-minute match, which she won by a revealing final tally of 6-9 9-0 9-1 9-3.

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