Egyptian World No.3 Nour El Tayeb enjoyed her most successful season to date on the PSA World Tour with title wins at both the U.S. Open and Windy City Open marking her out as one of the world’s leading players.
The 25-year-old combined flair with an iron-willed resilience as she wowed squash fans everywhere with a series of incredible displays over the 2017/18 campaign and those two traits were in abundance in the final of the Windy City Open as she came back from two championship balls down to defeat World No.4 Joelle King.
The tournament hadn’t been plain sailing for El Tayeb up until that point, with the Egyptian requiring 3-2 victories over Wales’ Tesni Evans, World No.1 Nour El Sherbini and England’s Sarah-Jane Perry to reach a sixth World Series final.
For her part, King was also in superb form having won the Cleveland Classic earlier on in the month but she was in unfamiliar territory after a semi-final victory over World Champion Raneem El Welily took her through to a first World Series title decider.
El Tayeb and King were meeting for the first time since 2014 and King started the better of the two, going four game balls up in the opener, before El Tayeb came back to go a game ahead.
The next two games were also tightly-contested affairs with King edging both of them on the tie-break as she overturned five game balls in the third to establish a lead for the first time.
El Tayeb came out swinging though as the talented Egyptian punished a series of errors from the Kiwi player to level the scores and take it to a deciding fifth game.
The match looked to be running away from El Tayeb as King – playing with control and authority – pushed ahead to hold two championship balls but she dug in her heels and came back once again to claim victory in an encounter that was named as the PSA Women’s Match of the Season.
Log in to SQUASHTV to watch El Tayeb’s incredible U.S. Open final win over El Welily.
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