I had the priviledge of attending the English Grand Prix squash finals at Birmingham University on Sunday.  I only live 20 miles from there, so just had to pop along whilst a good crop of the world's best were in town.  It was a great final and a perfect result, both from my point of view as an Englishman and from the sponsor's point of view now that James uses the new Prince O3 Black. 

It was a great display of attacking squash from both sets of players.  At 0-2 and 0-6 down in the third, it looked all over for Lincou, but at this point I turned to my son and said 'you watch Thierry come back from this' and he did not disappoint.  Still, this was one comeback too many in the end, and James ran away with the fifth.

I have been disappointed that there has been no media coverage of this fantastic event, even in our local media here in the West Midlands.  I have caught no coverage on our local TV news, radio stations or newspapers.  Squash gets so little press over in the UK, and yet we have world class players who win tournaments!  We just seem to want to celebrate mediocrity or 'heroic defeat', like Tim Henman or Andy Murray getting so far in Wimbledon or some other tournament but never quite making it all the way.  And yet squash is such an exciting sport to watch and actually televises quite well nowadays.  Is it the same in other countries re press coverage for squash?

Anyway, I captured the matchball moment on my trusty digital camera and have loaded it up to Youtube, so thought I would share it with you.  See it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMKLasQc_G4.  The quality is not too bad - you can even just make out the ball!  Look out for James' backwall boast along the backhand wall in the penultimate rally, which looked in all the way from where I was sitting, despite Thierry's protestations, so the match should probably have ended one rally sooner.

I have just downloaded the match from PSAlive.tv, so shall now go and relive the entire match.  I would recommend this as a download if you are interested in seeing how to play good attacking squash.

Cheers

Jimbob

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