Saurav Ghosal pulls out plan B, seals 10th National Championship
On the face of it, Saurav Ghosal looked quite calm for someone trailing 2-0 in the best-of-five National Championship final. He sat patiently in his dugout area at the Chandra Sekharan Nair Squash Stadium in Trivandrum between the second and third games. But his mind was racing.
There was a need to find a plan B if he wanted any hope of beating defending champion Harinder Pal Sandhu. The answer was to employ the ‘short game’ play, a strategy he has long considered the Achilles heel of his game. “I’ve been working hard at that area for the past few months but I’m still not really satisfied with the results,” he asserts.
“But today( on Monday), somehow, it clicked,” he adds. The 28-year-old returned much stronger in the third game, uprooted a slow start in the fourth, and polished the game off in the fifth to win a milestone 10th title 8-11, 4-11, 11-6, 11-7, 11-6.
Ghosal was just 17 when he won the first of those 10 championships. He continued to win eight more consecutively before losing out to Sandhu in the final last year. The journey to the landmark is one he fondly looks back on.
“It’s weird that I’ve actually been a part of three generations of Indian squash players, but I’m still just 28,” he says. Siddharth Suchde and Ritwik Bhattacharya – who was the last player to beat Ghosal in a national final before Sandhu – made up the first generation. They were replaced by Sandhu and Mahesh Mangaonkar, followed by upcoming players Ramit Tandon and teenager Kush Kumar.
“I had started off being pegged as an upcoming challenger, that too with reservation from some people. Now I’m the guy everyone in India wants to run down,” he adds. Yet on the international front, there are a set of regrets that still taunt the world no. 21.
Having never won the World Junior Championships is one that he laments can never be fulfilled. Nonetheless on the senior level, not yet breaking into the top 10 of the world, or winning a major tournament is something he still hopes to achieve. “I think I still have another five odd years, so there is still time for me to get those targets,” he mentions.
Still the man to beat
Within the country though, he’s still acknowledged as the man to beat. The field of competition now however, he claims is much harder than it was a decade ago. “Sid, Ritwik and I were the only ones there. Now there are four more with me. Earlier I was the one who had to do the catching up so there was less pressure.
Now they’re chasing me so it’s harder, especially since they’re all improving rapidly,” he explains. The final in Kerala itself, he asserts, was the ‘toughest national final he’d ever played.’
Towards his peers he still remains the ‘big brother’ on the squash court. Sandhu recalls speaking, as a teenager, with Ghosal. “We all saw Saurav get much stronger physically and in the game as well. But he’d always help us with our game. And that was always a big confidence boost for us because he was a top 20 player,” mentions Sandhu.
The 26-year-old Chandigarh-boy further claims that while he’s found it hard to win an elusive second national title, it would have been much harder for Ghosal to get 10. The senior player in the meanwhile claims to have given up on thinking of a number of domestic titles before leaving the sport.
“Now I want to end with a bang. So it’s all about the international sector now,” he concludes.
