Squash is slowly dying out in the UK, but Olympics could be lifeline
On May 18 in Cairo, squash crowned a new world champion. Diego Elias is a 27-year-old Peruvian, the first South American to lift the title.
But where were the Brits? Admittedly, the El Shorbagy brothers – Mohamed and Marwan – who were born in Alexandria but play under the English flag – came up against each other in the third round. Otherwise, there was not much to celebrate.
A sport that used to revolve around the Commonwealth Games has a new world order. Former giants such as Pakistan, Australia and Canada have dropped out of the picture entirely, leaving Cairo as the undisputed HQ. Across last week’s draws, 11 of the 16 quarter-finalists were Egyptian.
How do we explain this shift? In the UK, squash’s decline can be traced from the grass roots up. Covid dealt a hammer blow to participation figures, but even before the pandemic, leisure centres had been quietly converting courts into spas or fitness studios.
Meanwhile, padel and pickleball were emerging as sexy new racquet sports. Alongside these young starlets, squash began to look like Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard: an ageing diva holed up in a crumbling mansion.
“People like novelty,” said Nick Matthew, the former world No 1 from Sheffield. “One minute, you’ve got a squash court. The next, there’s 24 bodies in there, doing a ‘Zumba while standing on your head’ class.”
Now 43, Matthew peaked in the early 2010s – an era when four of the 10 leading males were English. Female talent did not run quite so deep, but we still had Laura Massaro winning the World Championships in 2013.
These days, the pickings are slimmer. Yes, the El Shorbagy brothers stand at No 7 and No 9, while London’s Gina Kennedy is a creditable No 6. But even Chris Robertson, performance director of England Squash, admits that “we’ve had a dip. Succession planning isn’t the easiest thing to manage”.
So far, so downbeat. But hang on a minute, because there is an upside to the new world order. It is not just the Latin Americans who are discovering squash. Last week’s World Championships also featured a rare semi-finalist from the United States. Olivia Weaver was only the second American to reach that stage, following her training partner Amanda Sobhy in 2021.
As Drive to Survive has demonstrated, US interest can be transformational for a sport. In squash’s case, it means super-rich benefactors, such as Mark Walter, the billionaire Chelsea investor who bought a stake in the Professional Squash Association last year. It means sports scholarships to Ivy League universities – a life-changing perk that padel and pickleball players can only dream of (and which Gina Kennedy exploited by studying at Harvard).
Above all, it means a place in the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028. After decades of failed attempts and near-misses, squash’s promotion to the Games is a huge deal. As Robertson puts it: “The Olympics will be the perfect spur. If the player base doesn’t respond to that opportunity, that challenge, it never will.”
To that end, England Squash is beefing up its coaching network. Interviews are ongoing for a replacement to long-serving national coach David Campion, while Matthew helps out when his commitments to his young family allow. And Rob Owen – a former world No 19 with a second career as a professional gambler – has been appointed “Olympic programme consultant”.
“The Tokyo Olympics had viewing figures of more than three billion,” Owen told Telegraph Sport. “For Los Angeles, I’d expect the numbers to be even higher. We only need a tiny fraction of those people to get a glimpse of squash, and that will make a massive difference. I’m hoping for a glass court in an iconic location. How about in front of the Hollywood sign?”
Despite his broad-sounding remit, Owen has one very specific responsibility. His academy in Solihull is already the training base for Jonah Bryant, an 18-year-old from Sussex who is the second-best junior in the world. Named after Jonah Barrington, the 1960s legend who all but invented high-performance squash, Bryant is the most promising British prospect to pop up for years.
Admittedly, there is an argument that Los Angeles might come too soon for Bryant. Squash usually favours players in their late twenties or early thirties, who have had the time to build up the capacity of their aerobic engine. But Owen scoffs at such pessimism. “Jansher Khan was world No 1 at 22,” he says. “We should set the bar high, expect the exceptional.”
In any case, there must be a reasonable chance that squash can parlay Los Angeles into an extended stay on the Olympic roster, thus feeding off the exposure already granted to racquet-sports cousins such as tennis, table tennis and badminton.
For Robertson, a visit to the Brisbane Games of 2032 would have a certain poignancy. Part of a powerful Australian generation that included Chris Dittmar and Sarah Fitz-Gerald, he was born there, rising to a high point of No 2 in the world before relocating to the UK in 1994.
“The courts disappeared,” said Robertson, when asked why Australia can no longer muster a single top-50 player. “A lot of them were built on valuable land, and they got sold off for development. But it’s different over here. Yes, there have been some losses, but England is still in a strong position when it comes to the numbers of courts and clubs. We certainly can’t use a shortage of facilities as an excuse for us not developing players.”
With the bluntness so typical of his birthplace, Robertson delivers a simple message: it’s now or never for squash in this country. And Matthew is on the same page.
“There’s a bunch of young players around the right age and they’ve got an incredible opportunity,” Matthew said. “When I was coming up, I’d have given my right arm to play at the Olympics. Well, the Olympics have come along now, and it’s so important that we capitalise, both as a country and a sport. Los Angeles may be four years away, but that’s going to go by in a flash.”
