After many so-near yet so-far in the finals, World No. 61 Abdulla Mohamed al-Tamimi of Qatar finally lifted his first ever PSA World Tour title after a gargantuan five-game battle with second seed Chris Hanson in the final of the Life Time Atlanta Open, a PSA M10 tournament in Atlanta on Sunday.
Top seed al-Tamimi, Qatar’s No. 1 squash player, scythed through the field in the opening stages of the event and only dropped one game, against semi-final opponent Clinton Leeuw, en route to Sunday’s final.
Local player Hanson, meanwhile, had eased past Diego Gobbi, Daniel Poleshchuk and Eric Galvez to set up a mouth-watering final encounter with the 21-year-old Qatari.
Both players engaged in some exciting, long-winded rallies from the outset as they each looked to move their opponent off the ’T’ and take advantage of the space at the front of the court. Al-Tamimi made the breakthrough in the opening game before a resilient Hanson powered to victory in the next to draw level.
Hanson then went ahead in the third by the narrowest of margins but the encounter was to have another massive momentum swing when al-Tamimi levelled things up with an 11-9 triumph in game four.
With the match heading into the latter exchanges, both players traded a number of high-octane points as the title hung in the balance. It was al-Tamimi who managed to hold his nerves when it was most required to rise above Hanson and claim a 3-2 (11-9, 4-11, 9-11, 11-9, 11-5) and break his PSA World Tour title duck after quite a few near-misses.
Al-Tamimi, who turned professional in 2011, broke the world’s top 70 in November 2014 thanks to some consistent performances before reaching his first PSA World Tour final three months later at the Guilfoyle Financial PSA Classic where he lost out to Declan James.
The Qatari reached two further finals throughout the year at both the Nash Cup and the Any Presence Open but narrowly missed out on both titles.
He has been in good form this season. He made the semi-finals of the Ganem Vein Institute Cactus Classic in Phoenix last month, and also made the quarter-finals of Oregon Open before that. On both occasions, he lost out in close five-setters.