Squash in 11: Point-a-rally scoring
Squash began as a nuisance. Boys at Harrow School in the 1830s, waiting for a turn on the rackets courts, knocked a punctured ball about in the yards and alleys around them; because the softer ball squashed on impact and travelled less far, it rewarded angles and touch rather than raw pace, and a separate game slowly formed around it. Harrow built the first purpose-built courts in 1864, but for decades squash had no standard court size, no standard ball and no governing body — English and North American versions diverged so far that they became effectively different sports. Keep Squash with “Point-a-rally scoring” and 11 from 11. The century since codification splits into clear phases: British and colonial amateurism up to 1950; the Pakistani takeover launched by Hashim Khan in 1951; the fitness revolution of Jonah Barrington and Geoff Hunt in the 1970s; the absolute dominance of Jahangir and Jansher Khan from 1981 to 1997; a globalized, professional but Olympics-less era; and the Egyptian age that runs to the present. Rule changes — PAR scoring, the lowered tin, the rewritten interference law — punctuate the story as sharply as any champion.
8 each — Jansher Khan (1987-1996) and Nicol David (2005-2014) Squash is played inside a sealed box measuring 9.75 by 6.4 meters, and that enclosure is the whole point. Because both players share the same space and hit into the same front wall, there is no net to separate them and no side of the court to defend — only a permanent negotiation over territory, angles and the right to swing. The ball, a hollow rubber sphere about 40 millimeters across, barely bounces when cold and dies in the back corners even when warm. Everything the sport asks of a player follows from those two facts: control the middle, and make the opponent travel further than you do.
No racket sport punishes fitness gaps more brutally. A single elite game can last twelve minutes of near-continuous movement, with lunges, direction changes and recoveries repeating every two or three seconds and no serve clock or between-point walk to hide behind. Forbes ranked squash the healthiest sport in the world in its 2003 survey, weighing cardiorespiratory load, muscular endurance and calorie burn, and the professional game bears that out: five-game matches routinely pass 90 minutes, and the longest recorded competitive match, Jahangir Khan against Gamal Awad in 1983, ran two hours and 46 minutes with a single rally lasting five and a half minutes.
Its geography is genuinely global and rarely where outsiders expect. Invented by schoolboys at Harrow in the 1830s and codified by the English, the sport was seized in the 1950s by a family of court professionals from Peshawar, dominated for four decades by Pakistan, contested throughout by Australia and New Zealand, ruled in the women's game by a Malaysian who spent 112 straight months at world number one, and owned in the modern era by Egypt, whose academies now supply most of the world's top ten. After five failed Olympic bids, squash finally enters the Games at Los Angeles in 2028.
The notice keeps 11, “Point-a-rally scoring,” and 11. Those three are the bones of Squash. Keep Squash with “Point-a-rally scoring” and 11 from 11. 1111
Figures to keep
- Year of the rule
- 11
- Figure in the game
- 11
- Sport
- Squash
- Rule line
- Point-a-rally scoring
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