As a local knock about squash player, although I do enjoy playing, you’re always told to be aiming for the four corners of the court as it’s the hardest place for the opponent to retrieve the ball.

I wanted to put that to the test and see where the pro players tend to hit the ball the most, dependant on lengths. As such, I’ve watched 3 matches online (or parts of matches) to see where players hit their shots. The options were front right, front left, middle right, middle left, back right and back left. To make this objective, I made the service box and another service box width in front of the line the middle (imagine another service box in front of the line). The back and front of the court is the other two areas.

As mentioned, I watch three matches to see their shot direction areas. The matches/games I watched were, which are all free matches on the PSA SquashTV YouTube channel:-

Laura Massaro vs Camille Serme- 2nd game at Tournament of Champions 2017

Ramy Ashour vs James Willstrop- Full match at British Open 2013

Mohamed ElShorbagy vs Ali Farag- 4th game at Qatar 2017

Interestingly, in all three matches, the player that hit more shots at a mid length, rather than at the front or back of the court, won the game or match mentioned above. In the respective matches, the stats showed:-

Massaro hit 76 mid length shots to Serme’s 58

Ashour played 146 mid length shots compared to Willstrop’s 126

ElShorbagy hit 148 mid length shots to Farag’s 127

Maybe we just have to hit more mid court length and just hope that gets us the win (only joking! 😉). This is often the case as that mid length shot is a dying length at the back of the court, so is more difficult to retrieve rather than a fuller length which may come off the back wall.

Whilst completing the statistical analysis, I found an intriguing stat that shows in the recent match in Qatar between Farag and Mohamed ElShorbagy, Farag played 62.21% of his shots to the backhand side and ElShorbagy an incredible 67.18% to the Farag backhand. It has to be assumed that this was the game plan of each player.

Interestingly, in the British Open match between Ashour and Willstrop, Ashour went short 19 times to Willstrop’s 11 in the first game, but Ashour did it with such precision. Joey Barrington in commentary said, “This is just amazing from Ashour. You just can not explain how he’s doing this.”

A great blog post done on the East Coast Squash Academy website stated, ‘Results showed 37.2% of shots were played deep to the backhand side of the court comparative to 17.3% that were played to the forehand, from an analysis of the men’s World Team Championships in 2003.’ The analysis of the match in Qatar showed only 17.66% shots deep to the backhand whilst only 8.06% were deep to the forehand side.

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his also got me thinking more about game plans and how much time must be spent on constructing a different game plan for each opponent, whilst thinking about strengths and weaknesses and potential opportunities and threats (the old SWOT analysis). In a blog post done with former professional world number 38 Aaron Frankcomb. Aaron detailed the extensive amount of preparation that goes into each match preparation. This includes writing out a detailed match plan focusing on where you see your strengths combating their weaknesses.It just gives us a little more to think about rather than just going on the court and not really thinking about the process of playing particular opponents.<<<<

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