Squash: Amazing Ashour back in world title contention again
Ramy Ashour beat Miguel Rodriguez to reach World Open quarter-finals on Tuesday.
DOHA (AFP) - Ramy Ashour, the most spectacular player on the world tour, showed that he is back in contention for the World Open title with an exhilarating performance Tuesday that carried him to the quarter-finals.
The twice former world champion from Egypt has not competed since suffering hamstring problems six months ago, yet his fitness was good enough to win a pulsating match full of sharp movement by 9-11, 11-6, 11-5, 11-4 against Miguel Rodriguez, the 12th seeded Colombian.
After losing the first game, Ashour began hitting the ball straighter more often, denying the speedy Rodriguez the darting, scrambling rallies at which he excels.
By the end, Ashour was playing more inventively again and it was hard to believe that a 30-centimetre hamstring tear had necessitated plasma rich platelet injections in a last ditch effort to save his career.
"I want to avoid talking about my body, and to talk about something else," Ashour said after a match in which he began to stretch more and more confidently for the ball.
"Sometimes you just have to go for it. You have to push yourself to enjoy it. That s what we do. We take ourselves out of dark places and put ourselves into the right places," he said.
Ashour next plays Borja Golan, the sixth seeded Spaniard who almost lost in five games to Fares Dessouki, the rising 20-year-old Egyptian, at the China Open two months ago, but this time prevailed 11-8, 11-4, 6-11, 11-5.
Ashour s successor as world champion, Englishman Nick Matthew, had to battle harder than expected against Saurav Ghosal, the 14th seeded Indian, trailing 6-9 in the fourth game of his 11-4, 11-5, 6-11, 11-9 victory.
Matthew turned it around by winning the last five points after loudly claiming that his opponent s winning volley drop had in fact hit the tin, the display of aggression appearing to influence the course of the match.
"I became guilty of thinking about tomorrow," he said. "And I was annoyed with myself.
"But I had that tiger in me, and I m pleased I channelled that because when you have that aggression it is easy to go over the top. I needed it because I could have been in trouble."
Matthew next plays Amr Shabana, the 35-year-old four times former world champion, to whom he has lost on the last two occasions and who reached the quarter-finals for the 12th time in a row.
The legendary Egyptian did that by overwhelming Max Lee, the rising Hong Kong player, by 11-6, 11-7, 11-4 with a wonderfully incisive performance in less than half an hour.
Shabana s compatriot Mohamed El Shorbagy, the world number one, made it three Egyptians in the last eight with an 11-8, 9-11, 11-9, 11-9 win over Simon Rosner of Germany.
This earned El Shorbagy a meeting with one of two unseeded quarter-finalists, Stephen Coppinger of South Africa, who looked almost finished after losing an 8-2 fourth game lead against Tarek Momen and then trailing the tenth-seeded Egyptian by 4-7 in the decider.
But he hung on through his tiredness, while Momen was unable to find ways of finishing the rallies, allowing Coppinger eventually to snatch an 84-minute 12-10, 9-11, 14-12, 8-11, 11-8 win, which was the longest of the day.
Earlier, the top seeded Gregory Gaultier was not at his fluent best but came through 10-12, 9-5, 11-9, 11-9 against Omar Mosaad, the disconcertingly tall and domineering Egyptian.
The victory owed most to persistence and desire, and the Frenchman will hope to play better when he meets another tall and difficult opponent, Cameron Pilley, the unseeded Australian.
