Give your opponent time to position herself on the other side of the court, closer to the back wall. To serve, give the ball a little toss and hit it cross-court to your opponent. For it to be a valid serve you must:. After the serve, the players alternate shots until someone wins the point. To make a good shot and keep the rally going, you have to hit the ball before it bounces twice, and your shot must reach the front wall.
You can hit the ball off the side or back walls first, as long as it eventually touches the front wall. Your shot must always stay in-bounds and above the tin, which is the strip of metal or wood along the bottom of the front wall. If the server wins the rally, she wins a point and serves from the other service box.
She keeps alternating service boxes until her opponent wins a point. If the returner wins the rally, he wins a point. He now gets to serve, and can choose which service box to start serving from. One of the unique aspects of squash is you and your opponent share the same space on the court. There are three possible outcomes:.
These situations can often be ambiguous. But in a casual match, both players have to agree on the call. Sometimes, this can get a bit contentious, so just remember to keep an open mind and do your best to make fair calls! This YouTube video from SquashSkills gives a quick overview on what to do if there is interference:. Please help to access more tools for the game. My enthusiasm and readiness grows everyday. But while the peak numbers are eye-opening, it is the speed of recovery and ability for players, following rest periods averaging between four-ten seconds, to reset their heart rate levels in preparation for another brutal rally, that are most impressive.
In contrast, Tennis players are allowed up to 25 seconds in between points to regather and recompose. In Badminton, the average time between points comes in at over 12 seconds. But the trials we have run with Sports Data Labs and interactiveSquash have allowed us to develop an understanding of players' movement and relative fitness, which go a long way to help illustrate the physicality of the sport.
To see players covering over one kilometre in a single game, made up entirely of three-six meter sprints, of which per cent is a backwards movement, followed by a lunge or dynamic movement before striking a shot, is quite staggering.
Since we started we looked at the data we tracked in squash and we knew how demanding the sport is for an athlete. Squash is a strategic game but we were thrilled to see that these athletes give each other such minimal space to get ahead. Skip to content. Nadal was in-play for 15 per cent of his. There will be fewer very long and very short matches, and most games will lie somewhere in the middle.
Thus the match durations can be described as a distribution whose shape can be statistically described in terms of mean, mode and standard deviation. The bar chart below illustrates the distribution of all the male and females PSA matches between — which are plotted in blue and red respectively.
The percentage of matches per gender is indicated on the y-axis and the match duration in minutes is indicated on the x-axis. This histogram is plotted with a bin-size of five minutes which means that each bar represents a five minute period of time. Each data set is fitted with a gamma distribution which is indicated by the full red and blue curves.
From the plot below It can be immediately seen that the male blue curve is shifted to the right when compared to the female red curve. This simply means that on average male matches are longer in duration than female matches. The basic statistics which describe the distribution curve are also given in the top right hand corner of the plot.
It can be seen from this table that all the male values are larger than their female counterpart. The average mean male match is 43 minutes and the average mean female match is 32 minutes. The mode statistics represents the most common occurring match duration, which is 38 minutes for males matches and 29 minutes for females matches. The above plot of course is composed of all PSA matches from through , including all PSA tournament levels, and at all stages of the tournaments. Intuitively, one can say the matches duration can be determined by the closeness in the quality of the players and thus the number of games in the match.
The above plot can therefore be categorized into matches of different scorelines i. These plots are shown below for both male upper and female lower matches where each scoreline is illustrated by a different colour which is indicated in the legend.
For purposes of presentation and aesthetics the actual bar-charts are not shown but rather the gamma distribution fitted to the data is illustrated. The chart is once again plotted in bins of five minutes meaning that the percentage of matches should be read and averaged in 5 minute intervals. For a given gender it can be seen that the gamma distribution is shifted to the right as the number of games increases indicating that the average match duration increases with the number of games, which is very intuitive.
However, for example there are still some 3 — 0 scoreline matches that are longer than 3 -2 scoreline matches. The statistics of each scoreline per gender is provided at the top right hand corner of each subplot. Again it can be seen both visually from the plots and numerically from the statistics that for a given scoreline, the male matches are longer on average with respect to the female matches.
For example for a scoreline of 3 — 2 the average male match is 71 minutes long and the average female match with the same scoreline is 56 mins. The fact that the amplitude of the peaks decreases as the number of games per match increases is simply an indication that the spread of match durations is increasing with increasing average time duration.
This is also shown numerically whereby the standard deviation, which is related to the spread, increases as the number of games per match increases. Using this technique to categorize the matches by their scorelines, we can also look at the mean match duration for each gender annually. The plot below shows the average match duration for all matches in a given year per scoreline for each gender.
It can be seen that during — the duration of the average male matches decreased in length. This happened proportionally for all scorelines indicating that it may have been due to a change in the game rules. This is most likely due to the implementation of the PAR scoring system in However, since , male match durations have remained reasonably constant. For the female matches the duration remains somewhat constant from — after which there is a substantial drop in the match duration starting in After a slight increase in the match duration remains consistent until after which point the match duration decreases regularly.
This regular decrease in match duration coincides with the implementation of lowering the tin height for female players. The above analysis provides an insight into how the match duration behaves annually over the last 20 years. However, during this 20 year there have been many changes in the game, the rules, the league structure, the refereeing which can all have an effect on the match duration.
The following are the statistics of the aforementioned data-set — which is split into three categories: the World Tour and Challenger Tour combined; only the World Tour matches; and only the Challenger Tour matches.
The tables above provide the number of tournaments, matches and matches per scoreline for each tournament type World Tour or Challenger Tour per gender. It can be seen that the percentage of matches note: the percentages are per for a particular gender per scoreline are in the same range, although not exactly the same, for both the World Tour and Challenger Tour.
This is also shown in the bar chart below which illustrates the percentage of matches per scoreline for each gender male: blue shaded background, female: red shaded background and each tournament grade World Tour and Challenger Tour. In this bar-chart the scoreline is plotted in the x-axis for each gender and the y-axis represents the percentage of matches for that scoreline.
This is most likely due to the format of the tournaments whereby the games in the early stages of the tournaments often have a larger PSA ranking gap between the players and thus have a much higher percentage of 3 — 0 and 3 — 1 scores. This will also prevent the sample size from becoming too small to derive statistically viable trends. The process of aggregating the matches by scoreline was repeated for the smaller data set from — The statistics turns out to be very similar to that of the larger data set — but all the values slightly lower indicating that matches have gotten shorter which agrees with previous results.
The main statistical results are again indicated in the subplot tables in the top-right corner of each subplot. One can also make a similar analysis by splitting the matches according to tournament stages, i.
The following plot illustrates the match duration distribution for the various stages of tournaments. Both from the plots and the statistics provided in the tables it can be seen that the match duration increases on average as one progresses in the tournaments for both male and female matches.
The above effect is explained by the fact that earlier stages will have matches whereby there is a larger PSA rank difference between players and thus result in shorter matches. Similar to a previous plot, this below plot is split vertically with male matches on the left with a blue shaded background and female matches on the right with a red shaded background. The tournament stage for each gender is provided on the x-axis and the percentage of matches is provided on the y-axis.
The coloured bars in each group represent the different scorelines which are indicated by the legend.
0コメント