If you thought junior matches were abnormally short, you should check out the current World Masters.
Through yesterday's play, representing four days of action and approximately 1,000 matches completed:
I found only 31 matches that lasted longer than 40 minutes, and I found only 2 matches that lasted longer than 1 hour.
This means 97% of all matches played thus far in Hong Kong couldn't break the 40 minute mark, and more than 99% of all matches played could not break the one hour barrier.
Worse, it appears that the majority of matches played did not last half an hour.
And a sizable percentage of those did not even survive the 20 minute mark.
In many cases, the pre-match stretching and warm-up lasted longer than the match!
Masters' players as a whole are not fast enough or fit enough to play competitive squash in its current form.
The UK Racketball version of squash would be much more appropriate for this group, but at the very least a faster ball and better scoring system need to be implemented ASAP to stop the bleeding in what is currently an embarrassing event.
Ted, Your comments are on target. I am also disappointed in how the PAR11 scoring system has curtailed match times. I will not travel for a league match or for a tournament if the format is PAR11. The match times are so short that the matches are uninteresting and physically unchallenging. The PAR11 format was crammed down to recreational levels by the governing bodies in the attempt to appease the Olympic hierarchy. The PAR11 scoring is only adequate for the highest level male players. It was never meant for anything else (that's why it was called Pro Scoring when it was introduced). Like your study at the World Masters, I have many more examples of mainly very short matches being played by high level players, e.g. check out the match times of the Women's World Junior Open. Thank you for your efforts to bring this matter to light.
ReplyDeleteShort matches might actually be better for older players though. Easier to recover and less chance of injury.
ReplyDeleteI think partly this is possibly due to some sorting issues that are common to tournaments where the basis is an age bracket rather than grading according to quality and ranking points—I would guess that there’s a very wide gap between a group that ranges from high quality but club standard players, extremely strong amateurs, professionals and even world-class professionals with only their ages in common. I’m not sure how long it would take for, say, Ross Norman to blow me off the court but I’d guess that anything more than about five minutes would be on purely compassionate grounds. I would guess that the matches will become longer in duration as the tournament progresses.
ReplyDeleteBut there is another factor that I think is being overlooked here : I think it is the universal experience of amateur players that match times have become significantly shorter since the switch to PAR to 11 points. In my home club, for example, league and challenge ladder matches that were once physically tough, have typically gone from 45 minutes or an hour to less than 15 minutes for nearly all standards of play. We recently had a challenge ladder match between two legitimate high « A » players that took less than 30 minutes to play four games. This seems to be very common for just about everything that isn’t a PSA event.
Remember, one of the main objectives of the switch to 11 point PAR was to shorten playing times of professional matches because too many were becoming 2 hour or longer marathons. The other was to force squash to become a much faster, attacking game that favors a quick start and the playing of shots almost from the first rally so that the professional game would be more appealing for television. As a spectator, I’m agnostic about the change —the increased emphasis on shot playing and athleticism has made some professional matching very exciting indeed but it’s a very different game even from PAR 15.
I think the rules change that was designed to keep professional matches to an hour in length has not been kind to the club or even high amateur game. Most club standard players (myself included) are perfectly capable of playing an hour long match with the traditional ball but most amateur players (especially including me) don’t have the shotmaking ability of James Willstrop or the raw athleticism and retrieving ability of Grégory Gaultier.
I would be willing to bet real money that just about all of the players that you think aren’t good enough to play with the traditional ball have spent years playing tough, hour-long matches against quality opponents using the traditional scoring method and probably would be doing exactly that at the masters tournaments but for the change in scoring. If you want longer duration matches in amateur tournaments, you need to change the rules again to encourage that.