A Primitive playing style but sometimes that last ditch shot is the winning one. 

I didn’t like the phrase when I first heard it and I still think it’s a rather crude and primitive way of playing the game. I’m not a big fan of attritional squash and I don’t think it’s a long-term way of playing personally but it does have a time and a place.

One of my early coaches imparted this one liner to me and whilst I can be pompous about it, it is undeniably true. No one who has kept the ball up one shot longer than their opponent, at least in the eyes of the marker, has ever lost a rally.

A focus when lacking sharpness 

I was reminded of that line this week as I returned to court for the first time in nearly a month after holiday and found myself making a lot of poor decisions and not hitting my target areas of the court. Despite a poor first game riddled with errors and sloppy movement, I decided that it would be better to keep going and practice my aggressive play, as I judged it would just take me time to get sharp again and I should play through it, which is a fair argument. It didn’t stop me from losing the match soundly that day though or the next day as I was beaten again in similar circumstances. Without much court time behind me, I just wasn’t finding the touch or accuracy I needed with any of my short shots or length on a consistent basis.

It’s amazing how many times you retrieve a good shot by just getting your racket on the ball or with a loose shot at full stretch, which  your opponent should put away, but instead they hit the ball in the tin because they got sloppy thinking they’d won the rally.”

It wasn’t too much of a problem, as it was just a training game after all. However, thinking more pragmatically, in order to improve my chances of winning the game, I should have adopted a more pragmatic approach and focused on keeping the ball alive. I just wasn’t sharp enough to get in the proper positions necessary to attack effectively, which meant I essentially forcing my shots and naturally made a lot of unforced errors. Cutting out the errors, I might well have won the match.

Secondly, if I’d kept the ball up more, I would have had more shots in general during the rallies, which would’ve also been significantly longer. The more shots I had, the more practice I would’ve got and the sharper I would’ve been from the practice. After all, the best practice is the practice that provides you with the most chances to hit the ball. With a few more shots under my belt, I might well have found myself starting to find my range and accuracy a bit more.

Everyone has got to have that steel about them no matter how skilful a player they are and there are always times when you simply need to keep the ball up and keeping that ball up just once more can often prove the difference.

It’s amazing how many times you retrieve a good shot by just getting your racket on the ball or with a loose shot at full stretch, which  your opponent should put away, but instead they hit the ball in the tin because they got sloppy thinking they’d won the rally.

Sometimes, you just need to keep that ball up one shot longer than your opponent.