Simon Herbert becomes men’s Mozart Open 2023 Champion

Austria’s biggest squash event, the Austrian Squash Challenge, reached it’s climax with the Mozart Open men final. Together with the women’s edition last week, wich is Austria’s only female PSA world ranking tournament, 12.000 USD on prize money were offered, which makes it is also the biggest PSA world ranking tournament in the country.

Today for sure it was the best attended day of the event with a full EUROPARK shopping mall offering a well deserved stage for the final match between topseed Simon Herbert (ENG, WRL 78) and fifth seed Robin Gadola (SUI, WRL 108).

The opening game was very even, with rather short and intense rallies. Simon was attacking a lot, especially with great drop shots. Most of them were clear winners, however he also produced some errors. His opponent also showed his attacking skills which equalized the score regulary until the very end of this game. So it had to be decided in the tie break in which the Englishman had the better and and won 12/10.

In the second game the topseed started very strong and raced to a 5/0 lead, from which Robin could never fully recover. Still the rallies were very well fought and very physical. There were many decisions of the referee having to be called. Of course not all the time both players were satisfied with those calls.

Simon won the second game comfortably 11/6, which put a lot of pressure on his opponent.

The absolutely packed crowed was hoping for an extension of the match and cheering a lot in favour of Robin Gadola. He paid back with a great effort and definitely proving, that there was a chance for him to turn around the match. He nearly did and saved one match ball at 8/10. But eventually Simon converted his second match ball – of course with a clinical drop shot – to win the game 11/9 and therefore the match 3/1 after 34 minutes of play. Congratulations to Simon for winning the title and also to Robin Gadola and all other players showing great squash during all the week.

Full result: [1] Simon Herbert (ENG, WRL 78) – [5] Robin Gadola (SUI, WRL 108) 12/10, 11/6, 11/9 34min

The price giving ceremony was attended by Vice-Mayor of the City of Salzburg Mr.Bernhard Auinger and Vice-President of the Sportunion Salzburg.

We would like to thank all our sponsors and our host EUROPARK Salzburg for making this unique event possible. Hopefully this successfull event can be a role model for any future events in Austria.

Also a big thanks to all our supporters and volunteers who did an amazing job over the past two weeks

The attached pictures are free to use only when mentioning our photographer Jasmin Walter. More pics can be also found in our gallery soon.