How long is a typical squash rally?
We took a look at average rally length in the PSA game. Twitter user Jesse Mills asked whether games contested between two Egyptians were over more quickly than those involving non-Egyptians. If so, this may be explained by the more aggressive squash typically played by the world’s dominant squash nation.
Jesse Mills looked into average game times in matches involving 0, 1 and 2 Egyptians.
In terms of game duration, this idea doesn’t seem to hold - as seen in Jesse’s chart above. But what about in terms of rally length?
We took at look at roughly 13,000 rallies–comprising almost 200,000 shots–in our database of PSA matches to test this theory. Do Egyptians play out shorter rallies than elite players from other nations? It depends if you play in the men’s or women’s side of the tour.
On the men’s tour, rallies contested by Egyptians are shorter
For the men, rallies played out between two non-Egyptian players typically last 13 shots. This is the median value. For rallies contested between an Egyptian and a non-Egyptian, this value falls to 12 shots. And for rallies involving two Egyptian players, the average rally length drops again, to 11 shots.
Perhaps more informative still is the statistical value known as the 3rd Quartile: in any set of data, the 3rd Quartile is the value under which three-quarters of data points are found when arranged in increasing order. This summary number helps give an at-a-glance indication of the shape of the data: in our case, helping paint a picture of typical rally length.
Put another way, when two Egyptians play, only 1 in 4 rallies lasts more than 19 shots. When two non-Egyptians play, this 25% cut-off points rises to 23 shots. It does seem to be true that Egyptians play out shorter rallies than British, French and Kiwi players.
In the men’s game, at least. Taking rallies contested by the world’s top female players, this pattern reverses.
Rallies played out by the top female players are longer when both are from Egypt.
The typical rally on the women’s tour lasts 8 shots. When two Egyptians step on court, this rises slightly to 9 shots. The pattern is clearer when looking at the 3rd Quartile value: 25% of rallies contested by two Egyptians last 17 shots or more. For 2 non-Egyptians, this figure falls to 15 shots.
What causes this pattern reversal? Much like in the men’s game–where you expect rallies between attacking players like Dessouky, Asal and the ElShorbagys to be over quicker than exchanges between retrieval specialists Paul Coll and Joel Makin–Egyptian players typically possess more attacking options than their non-Egyptian counterparts: ElSherbini hits the most Winners on tour, El Hammamy and El Tayeb can kill the ball from anywhere; even Nouran Gohar, who hits the fewest errors on tour, pummels opponents before they get a chance to acclimatise. Compare this catalogue to the fitness based game plans of Camille Serme and Joelle King.
The men’s tour tends to see longer rallies than the women’s
It may be that stroke-makers such as Amanda Sobhy (USA) and Sarah-Jane Perry (England) contribute to the shorter rallies between non-Egyptians. Or it may be an artefact of the data we’ve collected: we tend to concentrate our data collection efforts for now on quarter-final matches onwards. It so happens that these are the matches most closely contested, and matches which see a lot of all-Egyptian encounters. This is one question we’ll circle back to time and time again as we gather more and more data.
How long do rallies last at the top end of the PSA tour? The answer depends on whether you’re from Cairo or Connecticut, and on your chromosomes.