Pakistan was once the powerhouse of squash, and India minnows. Today India is well ahead of Pakistan in this sport.

India’s Saurav Ghausal achieved world’s top 10th ranking in 2019 while Pakistan’s top player at that time was ranked 58th.

And the latest international rankings show that India’s top player Ramit Tandon is ranked 31st while Velavan Senthilkumar and Abhay Singh are ranked 51st and 55th, respectively.

On the other hand, Pakistan’s top player Asim Khan is currently ranked 63rd while Ashab Irfan, Noor Zaman, and Nasir Iqbal are ranked 72nd, 78th, and 85th, respectively.

This has been quite an issue for lengthy debates among the local squash fraternity and they have been trying to figure out the reasons behind the downfall of Pakistani squash.

A cursory look at the debate on social media in this regard disclosed that there are two main reasons identified as conducive in this downfall.

First, the Pakistani squash fraternity is not happy with the coaching system of Pakistan Squash Federation (PSF) and with the performance of local coaches.

One reason for the under-development of national squash coaches is lack of modern squash coaching courses as only a few have been held in the country since 2013.

Pakistan is lagging far behind the Asian region as the regional countries have held two courses per year on average since 2013.

Pakistan conducted an Asian Squash Federation (ASF) sanctioned Level-2 coaching course in August 2013 in Islamabad and the next ASF Level-2 coaching course was held in October 2014 in Lahore. An ASF Level-1 coaching course was held in Islamabad in May 2016.

In 2022, Pakistan planned two (level 1 and 2) coaching courses in the month of February from 10-17 but they could not be materialised due to the unavailability of international instructors because of Covid-19.

Though PSF contacted Iran’s Ali Reza for conducting those courses, he too was in the United States at that time.

This year, the PSF conducted Level-I and Level-II coaching courses and there were seven participants for Level-1, 21 participants for Level-11, and eight participants appeared in both the courses.

Another reason for the decline in the production of talent for the national squash is the conversion of a few international events into local ones.

The country is facing scarcity of international events due to the financial crisis of both the PSF and provincial associations. Thus all of them have turned to organising lowest ranked satellite events in the last few years.

The high profile Roshan Khan international (popular Asian-level junior event) was the first casualty when it was converted into a seniors’ event.

Similarly, DG Rangers Squash Championship was an acclaimed junior event at Asian level with good foreign participations but it was first converted into a senior international event and then into a local championship.

In 2022, the prestigious Chief of Naval Staff International Squash, which had been a regular event in Karachi since 2015, was converted into a local event.

The first CNS International Squash had prize money of $15,000 (won by Nasir Iqbal from Pakistan) and it was increased to $25,000 in its second edition in 2016 (won by Zahed Salem from Egypt).

The third edition was held in 2018 with the prize money of $20,000 (won by Youssef Ibrahim from Egypt) and the fourth edition was held in 2020 with the prize money of $20,000 (won by Ivan Yuen from Malaysia).

The fifth edition was held with the prize money of $20,000 (won by Moustafa El-Sirty from Egypt).

Interestingly, all these events offer the same high prize money at the national level too despite losing their international status.

It is bad for local players who get expensive PSA membership to play such international events since they cannot afford to go abroad for events. So these conversions of international events into local ones are reducing participation opportunities for local players and rendering their expensive PSA memberships useless.

In any case, PSF should adopt a balanced approach and try to follow countries like Malaysia which do not hanker after high-prized events but simply focus on low-prized events to give ample chances of participation to their youngsters.