Top teams still in squash medal hunt

New Zealand’s top hopes for squash medals in the men’s doubles and mixed doubles kept their hopes alive today.

In the mixed doubles, Paul Coll and Joelle King, the top seeds, began the day against the Barbados team of Meagan Best and Shawn Best in the round of 16 and won comfortably 11-2, 11-7.

That put them into the quarter-finals, where they faced the fancied Indian pairing of Joshna Chinappa and Harinder Sandhu, the eighth seeds. The New Zealanders won in straight games, but it couldn’t have been tighter – 11-10, 11-10.

King said had expected the Indians to be tough.

“I was definitely not surprised,” she said. “Especially in the second, we had a good lead and were playing well and they kept breaking our momentum.

“They got a few lucky shots here and there. They have a very attacking style and we knew they would be tough.”

Coll and King are now into tomorrow’s semi-finals, where they face another Indian pairing, Karthik Ghosal and Dipika Saurav.

“We will definitely have to bring our A game,” King said.

 The other New Zealand mixed doubles combination of Amanda Landers-Murphy and Zac Millar fell earlier to Chinappa and Sandhu  11-7, 10-11, 11-5.

In the men’s doubles, the top New Zealand pairing of Coll and Campbell Grayson dispatched Pakistanis Tayyab Aslam and Farhan Zaman 11-6, 11-6 in just 26 minutes to earn a place in the quarter-finals.

There wasn’t such good news for the other New Zealand men’s doubles team of Evan Williams and Lance Beddoes. After beating the St Vincent and the Grenadines combination of Omari Wilson and Othniel Bailey 11-4, 11-7, they were beaten by  England’s seventh seeds Daryl Selby and Adrian Waller 11-1, 11-3.

There was no women’s doubles today but tomorrow the top New Zealand combination of King and Landers-Murphy faces a really testing encounter against experienced Englishwomen Jenny Duncalf and Alison Waters with a place in the semi-finals at stake.