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Womens US Open 02
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Owens
and Bailey To Meet In Weymuller U. S. Open Final
By Rob Dinerman © 2002 SquashTalk; all rights of reproduction
reserved.
Nov 16, 2002
Squashtalk Pro Squash Headlines
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| New Zealand's
Carol Owens, World #1 ( photo ©2002 Debra Tessier) |
top echelon after a prolonged absence from the game with a severe knee injury came at the expense of Owens, whom she eliminated in a stunning straight-game upset in the second round of the 2002 British Open last spring en route to the final round. Owens avenged this defeat when the two met in the Commonwealth Games this past summer. Both women are currently at or near the top of their games, which along with their recent exchange of victories should make for an interesting dynamic when the two meet in Sunday's 2 o'clock final.
Both women as well were forced earlier this evening to weather strenuous semi-finals, the outcome of which was in each case in major doubt. Bailey in fact fell behind third-seeded Linda Charman two games to love in the first semi before the latter unfortunately had to default in the fourth game due to an injury to her damage-prone left calf muscle, which has sidelined her several times in the recent past. In fact, she competed in last season's Weymuller event wearing a heavy bandage on this area, in which an MRI a few weeks afterwards revealed a tear that necessitated five full weeks of complete inactivity and a hiatus from WISPA play that lasted two and a half months.
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| England's Linda
Charman, World #6 ( photo ©2002 Debra Tessier) |
Especially along the left wall, where most of the exchanges were contested, Charman often seemed to be cutting the ball off and stepping into her rails, as opposed to Bailey, who was usually in the rear and hitting off her back foot or even while back-pedaling. Charman exudes a very assertive and confident body language in matches she is favored to win, and even though both of the first two games see-sawed along to 6-6, Charman nevertheless presented the manner of one who knows she will eventually come away with the game, which she indeed did in each case, by scores of 9-6 and 10-8 respectively.
To her credit, Bailey resolutely bootstrapped herself back into the match, as she had done the night before in winning the last two games after Pohrer had pinned a 9-2 second game on her. In this case, Bailey began the third game by working the deep right wall much more frequently and steering the action away from the left wall, where Charman had been out-performing her. This adjustment had the virtue of creating more open balls for her to hammer with her powerful forehand volley and prevented Charman from grooving her wing. Unbeknownst to either her opponent or most of the gallery, the latter was also by this time starting to really feel the ramifications of an innocent-looking collision between Bailey's knee and Charman's calf that occurred at 4-4 in the second game in Bailey's pursuit of a Charman backhand straight drop shot.
When the incident happened, Charman grimaced briefly and took a minute or two to stretch her leg against the side wall, but when play resumed her mobility seemed as good as ever, good enough in fact to enable her to as noted win that game in a tiebreaker, and most of the spectators had forgotten about it as that game evolved. But Charman's history with the muscle fibers in that calf ironically includes a prior Bailey-kneeing episode a few years ago, which caused her to have to default that match, and the continual tightening up of the muscle on this occasion made Charman alarmingly aware, her two-game lead notwithstanding, that it would be only a matter of time, and likely not much time at that, before she would be unable to continue. After letting that third game go, Charman signaled for medical treatment as she was leaving the court, and a friend massaged the muscle between games. However, Bailey swept to a 5-0 lead in the fourth, winning both the second and fifth (and, as it turned out, final) point on insufficiently angled backhand crosscourts that the pre-injury Charman would have pounced on and
punished but that instead meandered past this immobilized version for clean winners. Realizing the hopelessness of playing on, and fearing a serious tear if she attempted to do so, Charman shook Bailey's hand to concede defeat and exited the court on the verge of tears. After enduring the pain and difficulty of rehabbing an injury like the one she endured last spring, and surmounting these obstacles to regain her top form, it is incredibly frustrating to suffer a mishap like the one that befell Charman this night,
though fortunately it appears that the absence this time will be much shorter than before. It was nobody's fault, least of all Bailey's, but rather just an unfortunate by-product of this grueling game when played at so high an intensity level.
This latter quality was present in spades in the evening's second semi-final between Owens and the fifth-seeded Aussie Rachael Grinham, whose conditioning and determination levels had evoked such admiration from everyone present last evening when she had unrelentingly kept up enough heat even when trailing two games to one to finally break down fourth seed Vanessa Atkinson, who yielded before Grinham's glare in the 9-1 fifth-game conclusion to what has been by far the most memorable and pulsating match of the tournament. Owens is an absolutely superb squash specimen, possessing speed, power, agility, touch and the experience acquired by more than a decade of playing big matches. She usually simply imposes these qualities upon her over-matched opponents with a solid and error-free if unspectacular application of the fundamentals of the game.
Grinham, on the other hand, causes deaths by a thousand cuts, always jabbing, slicing and dicing, whether under-spinning her expertly angled working boast, carving her volleyed drop shots, lifting high, unvolleyable lobs or slashing away, generating unexpectedly high pace from her compact and even under-sized but immensely wiry-strong frame. Whereas Owens seems to flow powerfully to the ball, Grinham more dashes road-runner style to it, staying extremely low to the ground and amazingly getting her racquet to balls that seem hopelessly out of reach. Her constant misdirection shots and the accuracy of her placements and wiliness of her shot selection were too much for either her first-round opponent Jenny Tranfield or, ultimately, Atkinson to handle, and would have led to many more winners had Owens not been blessed with an extraordinary ability to start in the wrong direction yet still be capable not only of powering on the ball but often of doing something dangerous with it once there.
Still, other than in the 9-1 second game, when Owens really created such depth with her drives that Grinham was hemmed in and helpless, the black-clad Kiwi superstar was prevented by Grinham's tactics from ever establishing a reliable rhythm. In addition, she was frustrated by the relatively slow Heights Casino front wall, which nullified the power edge she enjoyed and gave Grinham time to react, increasingly fatigued by the constant direction changes she was being subjected to and feeling the effect of six straight weeks on the road (having flown from the Commonwealth Games to the Worlds in Qatar and thence to Brooklyn, where she had arrived a full 10 days before this tourney began) and away from serious training sessions.
As Grinham opportunistically seized on these cumulative factors and moved inexorably from 3-6 down to 8-6 ahead in the third game, a sagging Owens also later admitted she began having flashbacks of her recent Worlds semi-final with Pohrer just two weeks ago, when she similarly won the first two games but let down a bit in the third and wound up losing in five. A win in the third game by Grinham would have made these ghosts even larger, but Owens reacted like the champion she is by creaming a forehand volley into a nick to save that game-ball, getting to 8-all on a pair of Grinham tins, the first off a daring serve-return drop shot at 6-8 and the second on a crosscourt drop shot off a mad scramble up front. Owens then hit a forehand rail length winner to get to 9-8, match-ball, and gratefully watched a Grinham backhand drop shot from way back in the court tick the top of the tin, after which Owens threw her hands in the air more out of relief than joy and tried to catch her breath and get ready for her Sunday summit with Bailey.
SEMIS RECAP
Carol Owens d Rachael Grinham,
9-5 9-2 10-8
Tania Bailey d Linda Charman, 6-9 8-10 9-3 5-0, retired.
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