Hello and welcome back! In the first part of this mini-series, we ranked the best starters in men’s Squash. Asal topped the list. Gawad, as often suspected, starts slow. But so did Momen, Makin and Crouin - a surprise to many.

In this post, we try and figure out: does how you start even matter?

Sure, Gawad is a slow-starter, but he’s also a World No. 1 and World Champion!

The Power of the First Game

Commentators often talk about the “all-important first game”!

So, let’s start with a simple question. If you win Game 1, how likely are you to win the match?
The answer, in short, is: very likely.

Joel Makin, for example, wins 93% of the matches in which he won the first game. In contrast, for matches where he loses the first game, he only goes on to win 19% of matches…

And he’s not alone. Across the board, players are significantly more likely to win matches if they take the first game.

The First Seven Points

We also looked at game-level data. Specifically, if a player had a good start in the game2, are they more likely to win the game?

The answer for all players, once again, is: absolutely.

Take Ali Farag. When he gets off to a good start, he’s almost certain to win that game! In contrast, if he falls behind early, his win rate drops to 36%.

Farag’s iconic web-weaving

Interestingly, in our previous post, Asal ranked as the strongest starter while Farag was mediocre. Here, the roles flip!

Farag appears to be great at winning games, if he’s gotten off to a strong-start!

What could explain this?

One possible explanation is that Farag uses the early phase of the game to feel out his opponent, which leads to his frequent poor starts.

So, if he happens to be ahead despite starting slow (perhaps his opponent started even worse), then once he’s figured his opponent out and begins to “weave his web”, it’s game over!

Momentum and Psychology

How players start has a strong relationship with their game and match-winning success. But why does starting performance matter so much?

Momentum is one reason. String a couple of points on the board, and the momentum often snowballs. Lose a few, and the game can quickly unravel. The pros understand this deeply. Watch how much time they take between serves, or choose when to use the towel box. Simple attempts to maintain their momentum or disrupt their opponent’s.

Once players find themselves with a good start in a game, momentum enables them to maintain this lead and win the game. Once they’ve won the first game, they can carry that momentum forward to win the next 2 as well.

There’s a huge psychological edge. A strong start builds confidence, loosens the swing and lets you play more freely. A bad start, on the other hand, makes everything feel like an uphill battle. When you’re behind, you start to tense up. Every mistake you make pushes your opponent closer towards game or match ball. But, if you’re ahead? The cushion of a lead makes the consequences of a mistake far more forgiving.

But what about skill?

There is a simpler explanation…Maybe players who start strong and win matches do so because they were always going to win! They are just better, so of course they start well! And… of course, they win!

Perhaps it’s just skill driving the strong relationship between starting performance and win rates?

This is a valid counterargument, and there is some truth to this…but it’s not the whole truth.

If ability alone decided outcomes, we’d expect the world’s best players to start well and win no matter what! But they don’t. Ali Farag, Mohamed Elshorbagy, and Paul Coll, top-ranked at the time we crunched the numbers, were pretty average starters relative to their peers. Being world-class does not necessarily guarantee a good start!

The top players struggle to recover from a poor start, too! When Mostafa Asal, for example, loses Game 1, he goes on to win the match just 14% of the time! If match win rates were simply a proxy for skill, wouldn’t you expect this number to be higher?

These insights build on a common theme that Cross Court Analytics have observed in our analysis - top players are not invincible! They don’t necessarily start any better than their peers. And, as we noted here, they don’t win many more rallies. In 2019, Farag and Coll, two of the best performers that year, won just 57% of their total points played. This was only a few percentage points more than their peers!3

The reason they’re at the top isn’t because they dominate every rally, it’s because they win the right rallies. They’re tactically aware of which points matter most, and have the special ability to reach another gear to make those moments count.

I think a similar explanation can help us understand the strong link between starting performance and game/match success, too. The top players don’t always start well. But when they do, they all make it count. They’re tactically aware of how to capitalise on an early advantage - leveraging momentum and consolidating their lead.

So, in short, I’m sure player quality matters. But, the way a match starts appears to shape its outcome in ways that can’t be explained by rankings or skills alone…

How will you start?

How do you treat the opening rallies of a game or match? Do you focus on ‘easing in’, ‘finding your length’, ‘getting into a rhythm’? If you’re anything like me, the answer is yes.

The data suggests that’s a bad idea.

Those opening rallies matter. Win the first few points. Use that momentum to take Game 1. It could tilt the odds of winning 80 - 90% in your favour.

Data analysis, visualisations and content written by Dominic Long

Notes

The eagle-eyed amongst you might be wondering why those green and red bars aren’t adding up to 1…they shouldn’t. Let me clarify.

In the first chart, the green bar represents the probability of winning the match given they won Game 1.

The red bar represents the probability of winning the match given they lost Game 1.

These 2 probabilities should not equal to 1. What should equal to 1 is:

Probability of winning the match given they won Game 1 + Probability of losing match given they lost Game 1.

For the Math-geeks:

P(Match win | Game-1 win) + P(Match loss | Game-1 win) = 1

P(Match win | Game-1 win) + P(Match-win | Game-1 loss) =/= 1

2. We define a good start as “how often a player is ahead after the first 7 points of a game”.

3. This is a really interesting theme that seems to pop up everywhere once you start looking for it.

Ali Farag notes, in his brilliant interview with Nathan Clarke (Squash Player Magazine), that in his most successful season, “he won just half of the finals he was a part of”! (link)

In Tennis, Roger Federer notes, in his commencement speech at Dartmouth, that in his entire career, he won just 54% of total points played!

Fastest Out Of The Blocks: Do Fast Starts Matter?