Wandering through the New York Times recently I found an interesting book review entitled “It Doesn’t Take Genius to Understand Basketball. But It Helps” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/12/sports/basketball/nick-greene-basketball-genius.html . The book author spoke to a variety of experts in various fields to get their take on the sport of basketball.
Amongst a great article, which I suggest you read if you have the time… I found various different sentiments that would clearly apply to our sport as well. Ballet and a basketball being slam dunked was one example in the article, which could just as easily have been about watching a player jump up to smack an overhead into the cross court nick. My ballet knowledge is weak, but it none the less the notion resonates.
In terms of metaphors that I can better appreciate, there was one from an astrophysicist and one from a magician. Let’s go magic first.
To paraphrase, the magician was asked whether a crossover dribble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossover_dribble equated to a magic trick. Long story short, the magician’s professional opinion said… no, but suggested it was a nice misdirection. In the squash world, what does this equate to? So, if we assume there are three broad categories of deception, (which we can drill down on in other posts, but…)
- Timing deceptions (hides, holds, striking the ball in a different rhythm)
- Technical deceptions (where we hide the point of contact or intentionally give physical cues which are contrary to the usual, i.e. a big swing for a drop shot)
- Tactical deceptions where we deliberately break a pattern of play that we have established
So, without going through a verrrrry long diatribe on deception, I found it a pleasant and resonant way to speak about deception – are we deliberately trying to misdirect? Accuracy is lovely, tempo even more so, both together is gorgeous, but add in misdirection and wow, we have some really high level stuff cooking… Not bad to evaluate yourself and your practices and ask if that’s something we’re using. If so, great, if no, why not? Do we have all three types of deception, do we have technique, are we aware enough… Like all aspects in learning, judge yourself on the questions you can ask, not necessarily the answers you presume.
Let’s finish on the comment from an astrophysicist on basketball defense. To quote the article: “Good defense is invisible. It’s something you really can’t see because it’s the absence of good offense. It’s the ability to plan ahead of your opponents and prevent them from doing what they want to do.” Juxtaposing this concept into the squash world is comparatively simple. How are we keeping the ball out of our opponents hitting zone, how are we limiting their opportunities to express themselves?
Traditionally we have made life hard for our opponent, keeping the ball out of their hitting zone, with tightness. The ubiquitous straight drive, almost every coaches favorite thought, is one way with stress being put on tightness. Similarly, we can make life harder, and constrain and contain our opponents with height – as no matter how fit they are, “they can’t run up”! More controversially we can defend with sensible offense. Deception, which is where we started this chat, makes it very hard for our opponent to react to our strokes in a timely fashion. Perhaps depriving our opponent of time, and not giving them the opportunity to place a ball in their hitting zone becomes the most effective defense?
Deception as defense. Potentially not the be all and end all of the defensive conversations, however it deserves a place and as it’s seldom as frequently practiced and taught, perhaps it proves a nice competitive advantage.
See you all on the courts.
