El Sherbini claims 5th World Title
Some takes from Chicago as Nour El Sherbini downs Nouran Gohar to claim her 5th World Championships.
As discussed by the commentary team in the build-up, Nour El Sherbini hits a high percentage of her Winners from behind the services boxes. It was 40% vs. Amanda Sobhy in the semi-finals.
Nouran Gohar, by contrast, tends to hit her Winners from attacking positions on the backhand. In her semi-final against Camille Serme, Gohar hit almost half of her Winners from the mid-left region.
Footage from PSA SquashTV. Stats by Cross Court Analytics.
The same story unfolded in the final. Sherbini hit a third of her Winners from deep (Gohar 15%), and once again Gohar hit almost half her Winners from mid-left.
Nouran Gohar hit 65% of her Winners from the mid-court (Sherbini 26.9%).
In general, Sherbini’s approach of high-Winner-count, high-Error-count paid off.
Sherbini made 5 more Unforced Errors than Gohar, but hit 20 Winners to Gohar’s 16.
As noted, Gohar was particularly adept at hitting Winners on her backhand. She notched up 11 Winning shots from the left hand side of court (55% of all Winning shots), compared with Sherbini's 9 (35%).
Sherbini hit more Winners overall, but Gohar hit more Winners on her backhand.
While it was Sherbini who dominated the forehand Winner count. She hit 17 Winning shots from the right hand side of court.
Sherbini hit 17 of her 26 Winning shots with forehands.
When watching El Sherbini, it can sometimes feel like her Winners come with no warning. Indeed, she set up half her winners with shots from the backhand graveyard.
At Cross Court, we label as “Pre-Winners” those shots which set up a Winning shot.
Both players are known for their fast starts. But Gohar wasn’t able to hit an outright winner until Game 2.
All of Gohar’s 16 Outright Winners came in Games 2, 3 & 4
Looking at what brought each player success, Gohar prospered when both players were playing shots from mid-court. In those points the Terminator won, 4 in 10 shots were from mid-court and 5 in 10 from deep. When Sherbini won the rally, 3 in 10 shots were from mid-court, and 6 in 10 from deep positions.
Success for Gohar also came when she volleyed and when she stopped Sherbini hitting on the rebound.
As we often see, Sherbini was the one to make more use of the rebound. In Game 3 though, Gohar’s use of the back wall jumped from 1 in 5 shots to 1 in 4 shots (25%), while she was able to limit Sherbini to approximately the same amount.
Normal service was resumed in Game 4.
And throughout the match, both players switched play frequently, hitting a high number of shots cross court. We typically see 30-40% of shots played cross court.
Gohar began the match by hitting half of her shots cross court.
Drilling down into rally-pattern info, from front-left Sherbini hit 0 of her 18 shots down the line to deep. Small sample size, but her plan appeared to be exclusively counter-drop or cross court to deep.
Whereas from short on the forehand, the opposite take applies. Gohar was the one to counter drop straight or hit out cross court.
From deep left, Sherbini took the ball short down the line. Gohar went short with boasts.
From deep on the backhand, both players took the ball in every 11 shots. Sherbini did this straight; Gohar did this cross court.
This is confirmed in the actual tally. The bottom bars show Gohar hitting 12 boasts to Sherbini’s 4.
From mid-left, El Sherbini was twice as likely to play cross court to mid.
Sherbini hit cross court to mid on 21.0% of shots, compared with Gohar’s 10.4%
But, this was only on Ground Strokes, not Volleys.
The same was true from mid-court forehands. In a nutshell, Sherbini hit cross court on Ground Strokes, Gohar hit cross court on Volleys.
A final note on rally length. With both players adept at finding Winners, only 21 of 82 rallies were over 12 shots in length.
75% of rallies were under 12 shots in length.