Bengaluru: “I can’t believe you’re doing this all over again!” former world champion and Egyptian pro Tarek Momen texted Saurav Ghosal on Sunday. It was the night the 38-year-old Indian won the Octane Sydney Classic, a PSA Challenger title, on his comeback from retirement. His eleventh PSA title. It came a year after his last PSA appearance at the Windy City Open in Chicago in February 2024.
Saurav – the first Indian male player to break into the top-10, had announced his retirement in April last year after over two decades on the PSA Tour. By the close of the year, he was prepping to create geometric angles and haul his body across the court all over again. The end goal – Los Angeles 2028, when squash will make its Olympic debut. For someone who spent decades on the Tour dreaming, wishing, and campaigning for the sport’s Olympic inclusion, it seemed too huge a moment to give up without attempting a shot. It’s still three years away and Saurav is under no delusion about his age. The more immediate goal – Asian Games – is little more than a year away.
“When I retired, I still wanted to play for India. But I wanted to come back only if I felt like I could add value. I didn’t want to just play for India and make up the numbers. I wanted to come back and win things. But for that, I needed to get away for a while and see whether mentally I had the drive to want it bad enough,” Saurav told HT.
By the end of summer, Saurav had an answer. The next question was whether he was physically still in shape. He began training in the third week of August. “The first couple of weeks were brutal. You’ve trained for so many years, but then if you don’t train for four or five months, you feel like all your skills have deserted you. After a couple of weeks, things started coming back to me and I began to feel saner during the training sessions.”
He then travelled to America to meet his old coach David Palmer and physical trainer Damon Brown and floated the idea of a comeback. “They made me push my body pretty hard to see whether it could take the hit. There were certain aspects that needed to be sharper, but we felt like my body was holding up all right.” In December, he headed to Pontefract to train with buddy James Willstrop. “What was great was all these guys – David, Damon, James, believed in what I could do more than I did myself.” In January this year, Saurav re-registered as a PSA player.
Now, for Saurav it’s about trying to add more variation to his game to make it more potent, to use the entire real estate of the court as much as possible and to have faith in his ball control to do these things. “In the last 4-5 years, the physicality of the game has reached another level. Though I’m older, my body is strong enough to withstand what’s thrown at me. Of course, taking care of the body is more time consuming now than earlier. I have more days now when my body and mind are pulling in opposite directions.”
After a title on his return last weekend, getting his limbs and will to last another couple of years on court is the priority. Rather than look at it as a mammoth goal, he prefers to break the next three and half years down into bite-sized chunks. “Right now, we’re focusing on getting back on Tour a little bit and not going overboard with it. I’m going to be 39 this year. So, I don’t think I can go crazy for the next three and a half years and then turn up in LA fresh because that’s what I will need to be if I want to have a chance of doing something substantial.”
Though he’s back to boasting, driving and chasing balls around box-like courts, Saurav has already set the next chapter of his life rolling with academies for grassroots players. He has set up a couple of them in Maharashtra and is hoping to add a few more across the country. “The most effective way to churn out high-quality juniors I believe is to first train coaches. No one expects a 10-year-old kid to hit the right shot at the right time. They won’t have the control or the skill. But at least they should know that this is what they should be doing.”
