COLOMBIA totally dominated the court yesterday in the finals of the Pan American Doubles Squash Championships in Lima, Peru with a clean sweep of all three events: Mixed, Women and Men’s doubles.
“We had a good day yesterday at the doubles, there were some good matches all the way through the tournament, but it was nice to see I think our teams continued to get better all the way through” said Martin Knight, Colombia’s National Coach. “We knew the mixed was going to be tough, Canada had a very strong team and had been winning their way comfortably through to the final. It just all came together in the final, I think we had a good game plan and the match started off very even, throughout the middle part of the first game, Maria stepped up the court and started to take charge of the match, she hit a series of winners, giving us the first game. In the second she was all but unstoppable, it seamed that every time we needed a point or it was getting close, she stepped up again and had a series of winners stashed away. Matias played well, keeping the pressure on and doing what he needed to as well, we were very happy with the win and the first 🥇
COLOMBIA (Maria Tovar & Matais Knudson) 11-8, 11-7 over CANADA (Nikki Todd & David Baillargeon)
“In women’s”, continued Knight, “both Lucia and Cata have a lot of doubles experience, they also just played the South Americans together a month ago, winning gold. They used their experience well creating a lot of opportunities early on, the Argentinians fought hard but couldn’t find a way to open the court up and hit clear winners.
COLOMBIA (Lucia Bautista & Catalina Pelaez) 11-5,11-8 over ARGENTINA (Pilar Etchechouri & Valentina Portieri
“The men’s final had 2 parts, the first game was quite tight, the ball bouncing around on a hot and fast court, both teams having a little trouble controlling it and finding space. There was a lot of unnecessary contact between players and this server them more than us. Still we managed to take that one and reset for the next game. The second game was a much higher quality game (at least from our point of view), the boys found their targets better both in the length and finding the nick. Juan Camilo hit a couple of sublime straight and cross court kills, Rony played with great variety on the left wall, they saved their best squash of the tournament for that game”