the use of good width more often than not that when we're learning how to play the game of squash we're often told that cross courts can be very dangerous in my opinion a good crosscourt can be actually the best shot in the game but a bad crosscourt can be one of the worst and a lot of the times what ends up putting us under pressure is actually a poor crosscourt which enables our opponent to volley in the middle of the court so what we need to be really aware of is the width that we are
hitting I've seen many players use the width in an attacking way but I've also seen them use use really good width in a defensive way and when I think of the defensive width and thinking about how we hit around our opponent one of the things that comes to mind is that when when you're being dragged to the front of the court and you feel very anxious about hitting a straight ball here okay because we're worried about hitting into a stroke or worried about not hitting the ball tight is that we more often than not hit
a cross now what's really important especially under high pressure situations is that when we have feel more pressure our cross becomes more narrow our cross is not wide enough and at this moment it's one of those things where you can't the The Wider you hit across actually the better it relieves more pressure it relieves more stress so being able to understand your angles specifically in times of pressure being able to have the opportunity you need to be able to put yourself in the right position to be able ble to hit a shot like this but
being able to hit good width to get around your opponent's volley is actually going to end up putting more pressure on them after they exerted the pressure off on you so just imagine your opponent takes you up to the front of the court they're looking for that either straight ball or maybe that narrow narrow cross and all of a sudden you're able to hit the ball wide around them all of a sudden now they're going back and having to play a shot which they're uncomfortable with and all of a sudden your movement then has gone
from here back to a place of of POS a position of power as we would say or a really positive position where you could put pressure on your opponent one of the ways in which we can work on that especially specifically from the front of the court is two players are drilling player from the back hits a drive to himself then he hits a boast up to the front of the court so as they see the person the boast comes in that player who just boast is just going to try to Vol the cross court
so we need to make sure right that that cross is wide here so when we do boast Cross Drive more often not that person's cheating right there so we have to change the angle of the Cross and when we do this drill more often than not the cross comes up the middle it comes through the court so what I actually want is a sharper angle towards the sidewall I want that ball to break almost towards where the the service line meets the sidewall to give that person a really uncomfortable half volley or maybe even having
to go back and play a chipped straight drive option right so those routines sometimes they get monotonous in a way that the people know where the ball's going and actually it's good that they know where the ball's going because in this case when you're over hitting your crosscourt you're getting that feeling of wow that was a that was a good with and so sometimes we want to over exaggerate kind of over hit that angle in order to make sure it gets past our opponent
