Owens Motors to Weymuller Cup semis at Tournament of Champions.

Rob Dinerman, Squashtalk reporter on the scene in New York City.

by Rob Dinerman, Grand Central Terminal, New York, 30 Jan 2002
All content © 2002 Squashtalk, photos: © 2002 Debra Tessier

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OWENS WILL FACE BRIND IN THE SEMIS

Carol Owens(foreground) over powers Omenya Abdul Kawy (photo © 2002 Debra Tessier)

The bottom half of the quarter-final round of the women's draw in the 2002 Tournament of Champions was played Wednesday evening, and both favored players advanced to the semis. Second seed Carol Owens overpowered the precocious teenage Egyptian qualifier Omneya Abdul Kawy 9-2, 5 and 1, but fourth seed Stephanie Brind encountered considerably greater difficulty in the last and by far most competitive match(including the two men's quarters) of the evening against fellow English countrywoman Rebecca Macree before finally prevailing 6-9, 9-1, 9-6 and 10-8.

This pair will meet this evening on the four-glass-wall portable court in Grand Central Station at 7 pm, and their semi-final counterparts in the draw's top half, top seed Sarah Fitz-Gerald and unseeded Natalie Pohrer, who has already dispatched two seeded players on her way to the Final Four, will face each other at 9 o'clock.

Egypt's Omenya Abdul Kawy (photo © 2002 Debra Tessier)

Although the 16-year-old Kawy, who represents the Maadi Club in Cairo, is not yet ready at this tender stage of her career to defeat a top-three player like Owens, she already has a very mature tactical game to go along with her subtle touch and graceful, noiseless movement. She anticipates well and flows seemingly effortlessly to the ball, and in the early part of each game she played her heavily-favored opponent to a virtual standstill. Already with two qualifying wins and an impressive first-round defeat of eighth seed Tania Bailey (saving five fifth-game match balls before winning 10-9) under her belt, Kawy evinced both a praiseworthy lack of fear and an ability to make last-second wrist switches from an apparent straight drop to a crosscourt drop that several times wrong-footed Owens, most notably in the opening section of the second game, when Kawy, after dropping the first game 9-3, moved to a 4-0 lead.

New Zealand's Carol Owens ((photo © 2002 Debra Tessier)

The 30-year-old Owens, born and raised in Australia but now playing under New Zealand's banner, won the World Championship in 2000, reached the final of the British Open last year and has been a top-five fixture since 1995. In addition to her implicit edge in experience and tournament achievement, she is a dynamic physical force on court, whether while stroking her powerful drives or even more so in her court coverage. She does not so much retrieve the ball as power her way to it, especially on a shot to the front court, exuding a sense of muscular horsepower that none of her WISPA colleagues can emulate. These formidable qualities enabled Owens to assert herself in mid-game streaks in both of the opening pair of games, including a run in the second from 0-4 to 6-5, following, after a couple of "hand-out" exchanged, Owens got two consecutive stroke calls in her favor when a tiring Kawy failed to adequately clear. Cashing this game in at 9-5, Owens then sprinted unimpeded through a dominant 9-1 third game to finish off her youthful opponent, though it should be said of Kawy that she made a major breakthrough in getting so far in an event of this magnitude and that, even in this decisive quarter-final defeat, she showed many signs of the qualities that augur so well for her future.

England's Rebecca Macree(foreground) and Stephanie Brind battle it out for the dedicated late night crowd.(photo © 2002 Debra Tessier)

In contrast to this match, which was entertaining and high-quality but fairly pre-ordained as to its outcome and hence free of competitive tension, the Brind-Macree quarter-final was a taut and grinding battle possessing none of the flow of its predecessor and characterized by great competitive intensity which led to a number of unpleasantries directed by the combatants to both the referee and each other. There was a lot of pushing and jostling at the tee, frequent appeals and a series of difficult choices for the referee and marker.

It is a shame that by the time this fourth and last match of the evening began, it was just after 9:30 pm and the previously full gallery had thinned to just a few dozen, a shrinking process that continued after each game, as fewer and fewer people remained to witness an increasingly gripping on-court struggle.

The 22-year-old Brind, who is a rising star in the British national squash program, was accompanied by a coach, a strategy analyst and a physio-therapist while Macree, 29, does not participate in this program and hence had to rely on the advice of her WISPA friends between games. She is no stranger to adversity, either in this tournament, where she had been forced to climb out a two games to love hole in her first-round win over qualifier Annalise Naude several nights earlier, or in her life, where she has learned to cope with near-total deafness, which makes it all the more remarkable that she has attained her current No. 10 ranking in a sport where sound perception is an under-rated and taken-for-granted but enormously important factor.

After seeing her slightly older opponent move from 6-6 to 9-6 in a hard-fought opening game, Brind became more aggressive in her volleying in the second and seized an 8-0 lead against Macree, who stopped running after several seemingly retrievable balls late in Brind's surge. The third game was close and mean throughout-at one point Brind became so irked at what she felt was excessive pushing that she warned Macree to cut it out and punctuated this message by walking over and shoving her. Macree is long and lanky and does occasionally slightly push off when she changes direction, while Brind is a quiet executioner, much less expressive than her emotive foe, but plenty physical in her own right. This clearly important game seesawed onwards, with ties at 3, 4 , 5 and 6, and the lion's share of the exchanges occurring along the left wall.

Macree was making many of her winners on backhand straight drop shots, while Brind seemed to be winning more of the points that utilized the entire court; her crosscourt drop volley was a big weapon that helped her manufacture a late run that brought her a 9-6 win and gave her a 2-1 advantage at the break.

The fourth was more of the same, close all the way after Macree's early 3-0 edge was quickly nullified. She appeared to be the more fatigued of the two (though nowhere near as fatigued as an elderly spectator, who was discovered post-match completely conked out in the front row of the right-wall gallery and who would presumably have spent the night there had not a tournament official gently prodded her awake), though she continued to retrieve and compete relentlessly.

Though Brind had learned in her previous pair of won games that she was at her best when she upped the pace, it was becoming harder by this time to resort to this demanding tactic and when Macree slowly moved from 3-5 to 7-5 and 8-6, she seemed ready to force a fifth game and possibly to pull off her second comeback win in a row. That Brind was able at that crossroads juncture to muster up a game-saving and match-winning rally against so determined a veteran opponent is a huge tribute to her daring and ability to rise to the occasion. A flurry of nick-finding crosscourt drop shots (including one that fell for a winner on her second and last match point) enabled her to rally from 6-8 to 10-8 and to wrest that last semi-final slot from a doughty but drained and very disappointed Macree. Brind's match with Owens will go on at 7 o'clock Thursday, while Fitz-Gerald's balancing semi with Natalie Pohrer is scheduled to begin at 9 pm.

Results:

Carol Owens (2) (NZL) bt Omneya Abdel Kawy(EGY)Q 9-3, 9-5, 9-1
Stephanie Brind(4) (ENG) bt Rebecca Macree (6) (ENG) 6-9, 9-1, 9-6, 10-8