Zurich, April 25 (IANS) India’s Abhay Singh lost to Karim Gawad, an Egyptian former world No 1 and world champion, in a thrilling men’s quarterfinal match at the Grasshopper Cup squash, a PSA Gold-level event.

World No. 24 Singh recovered from a 6-0 deficit to force a tie-break in the first game. The second game was fiercely contested against world No. 4 Gawad, but the Egyptian second seed ultimately won the match with scores of 12-10, 11-9.

Former World Champion Gawad produced some high-quality, enterprising squash throughout his 32-minute tussle with Singh. The world No.3 came firing out of the blocks in the first, charging into a 6-0 lead with some scintillating finishes. Singh, who was appearing in his first-ever Gold quarter-final, stormed back to level proceedings while some errors from Gawad helped him get back level.

After seeing one of his game balls saved, Gawad converted in the tiebreak to go 1-0 up. Singh was applying plenty of pressure on Gawad, which helped him open up a 5-2 lead in the second.

Singh stood toe-to-toe with Gawad as he looked to find a foothold back in the contest, but the Egyptian held firm to take the second and progress to the last four.

“I’m really happy. The pace was really fast, we’ve only played twice but I feel like we’ve played more than that. In Qatar he beat me in four and today I got on court and thought I don’t want to lose again,” Gawad was quoted by PSA Tour.

“In best of three with one of the smartest and talented players on Tour, you can never see what he’s thinking with the next shot or the next rally. He can come back with crazy points as you saw in the first game when I was 7-0 up and he came back out of nowhere in less than three minutes we were tied. You can never underestimate what’s going to happen next to finish to the very end of the match.”

–IANS

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