How would the world's best squash players fare at Wimbledon? Not well

It’s always about this time of year when I get the pangs. When the tennis is everywhere and the Tests are on and I’m just embarking on another summer of training for squash, indoors, as the sun blazes away outside. I can’t help but imagine what might have happened if I had picked up a tennis racket or a cricket bat rather than a squash racket when I was four years old. Presumably I could be at Wimbledon now if I had done this or that, or if my family had been tennis nuts. If, if, if.

But then, on the evidence of my tennis nowadays, perhaps I wouldn’t be competing against Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic. What do I have going for and against me? Well, I’m a giant, so I would have served well. There’s a lot of resting and switching ends in tennis, which would suit me, but the matches are very long. Three and a half hours might be too much without any coffee breaks. Squash matches are over faster, but tennis players can towel themselves down after every two rallies. As a heavy sweater, that would be welcome – and you can send people for towels and drinks at will.

I could cope with cricket. There would be plenty of time to relax in the field and think about my leading edge duck, and I would love the teas. There might be weight fluctuation. Batsmen face a lot of psychological pressure, which might cause problems. Being pale-skinned I would struggle with the constant sun exposure in both sports. On the other hand, the bank account would look much healthier if I had played either of these professionally instead of squash. I could afford to take three coaches, a water man, a racket stringer and my own personal garden-pruner to Wimbledon. And moreover the hips and knees might not be run to the bone as they are now.

We occasionally see athletes delving into other sports, particularly towards the end of their careers. Some of these are more serious, some are perhaps governed by marketing concepts. Think of Andrew Flintoff’s venture into boxing, Dwain Chambers’ move to rugby league and Victoria Pendleton’s change from cycling to horse racing. It’s always compelling to see how great athletes cope with playing different sports.

Some top athletes of this era were so talented early on in their development that they had to choose a sport. The Neville brothers were good cricketers (Gary shared a batting partnership with Matthew Hayden once), Stuart Broad trialled for England at hockey and Adam Gemili was a member of Chelsea’s youth academy. Then there are the athletes who played two or more sports to a high level, pretty much simultaneously, during their high-class careers. Fred Perry was a world champion at table-tennis; Dennis Compton played for England at both cricket and football; and the king of versatile was perhaps Jim Thorpe, an American athlete who won Olympic gold medals in pentathlon and decathlon, and played professional baseball, basketball and American football.

It is very difficult to imagine feats like these being repeated in the modern era. Standards of training and professionalism are so advanced and each sport takes on greater specific demands. Each athlete is finely tuned to their own sport. I am a conditioned squash athlete who would be found out if asked to run five miles, play football or compete in the decathlon. A squash player’s body is trained to use the muscles and work in the patterns that the sport demands, and playing football involves a whole different group to squash.

Rebecca Romero offers us an example of high-class sporting transfer in the modern era. She won an Olympic silver medal for rowing in 2004 and then won gold medals for cycling at the Olympic and World Championships in 2008. This is an incredible achievement, but transferring is more achievable in certain sports, because of the physical requirements and because they are less dependent on complex skills. It is still worth noting it would be practically impossible to be a world champion in both sports at the same time.

I was asked recently where I, as a squash player, would stand on the world tennis rankings. It seemed fairly obvious to me that I would be nowhere in sight, but I can imagine a non-professional might think that the crossover is significant. After all, the basic principle is to hit a ball into spaces, perilously close to marked lines, while running around at full throttle within the framework of a rally. On the surface there appears to be similarities, but the transfer can only take you so far.

Squash and tennis require highly specific sets of skills. The practice that an athlete does from their young years builds and builds, until the skills are embedded in the sensory circuits and become second nature. The brain becomes more and more configured to construct rallies specifically in the given discipline, and patterns and plays in the two sports become almost automatic.

A squash player’s skills would go so far in tennis, but there would be a limit and that limit would reach nowhere near world level. If you asked the world’s top squash and tennis players to face each other and the two sports, it would be a damp squib of a spectacle, which might be a surprise to some. If I were to transfer to another sport, I should forget about tennis, or any other sport involving such complex skills. I’d be better off trying boxing like Flintoff. If nothing else I could give people a laugh.

In the mid 2000s I clapped eyes on a poster at Leeds Carnegie University, which called for the attention of young people who were tall, generally athletic and who might have an aptitude for endurance sports. It alluded to the London and Rio Olympics in 2012 and 2016, and that associations of certain sports were looking to recruit athletes to win medals.

I was intrigued by this advertisement for talent. It implied that even a person with a decent level of fitness, the right build, the required age and enthusiasm could find success, or even a place at the Olympic Games, under the watchful guidance of world-class coaches and with the support of a world class system.

Sports such as badminton, table-tennis and football – all on the Olympic programme – would never have featured on the poster. There is no way of recruiting at such a late stage for them because the skills need to be wired in years before.

I made the right choice playing squash. Well, there wasn’t a choice, because I wasn’t good enough to play anything else, and however bright the sun shines there’s nothing like bashing a black ball around in a sweaty glass box. Certainly no regrets, save for a couple of weeks in July.