NSL RECAP – ATLANTA TORNADOS VS. NASHVILLE CRUSHERS 2025!
NSL RECAP – ATLANTA TORNADOS VS. NASHVILLE CRUSHERS 2025!
Welcome to the Essence of Massie for Match 2 of the NSL Regular Season – Nashville at Atlanta. Nashville is called the Crushers because of all the shattered dreams of squash pros who were forced to become country music stars there, and Atlanta is called the Tornados because they play at the Atlanta Community Squash Center, and it is large enough to have its own weather patterns.
OVERVIEW:
After a decisive Nashville victory in Nashville last season, 200 people are in attendance at the ACSC to watch their hometown team get revenge. They hiss as Nashville is announced, and I, for one, am extremely encouraged by the amount of hostility they are showing.
Nashville represented the South in the NSL Finals last year, losing to the New York Knights when “Slim” Timmy Brownell’s furious last-second rally came up just short. They kept Slimmy and the part-man, part-giraffe Ron “Your Pal” Palomino, but they controversially parted ways with Simon Herbert in an attempt to get bigger and balance out Coach Dylan Cunningham in the team van. Fortunately, World Number 63 Moustafa Elsirty was already in town working a second job as a spare tire in a monster truck rally, so he got the call for the Crushers.
Atlanta, meanwhile, completely rebuilt their roster to find players who better fit with Coach Célia Pashley and her sense of humor. Those who survived the pudding-in-the-whoopee-cushion test were offered contracts, and so today they have an all-new-lineup featuring England’s Tom “The Golden Lion” Walsh, an influencer calling himself Machine Gun Sharaf, and Veer “Encyclopedia” Chotrani, who of course knew the answers to the test beforehand.
THE MATCH ITSELF:
The match was a back-and-forth affair, but there’s no question the star of the show was Ron Palomino’s shorts, which are VERY Latin American. As soon as we get a team in Miami he’s switching to a speedo. We also celebrated the arrival of Egyptians in the NSL and it completely lived up to the hype, with Elsirty and Machine Gun setting records for sketchy antics in their back-to-back powerplay debuts and delighting announcer Sean Choi. Finally, Veer and Brownell (who changed his nickname to the “American Sniper” to buy time from his creditors), took things down to the wire in Period 1, with Atlanta eeking out the W, but a Wifi catastrophe between Periods 1 and 2 meant Nashville took the opportunity to tie things up and guarantee we wouldn’t have a shootout. Determined to make amends, the Tornados raced out to an early lead in Period 3 and then held on through laughable amounts of contact to bring home victory for the delighted home crowd.
Behold the Chart of Charts! Asterisks mean power plays.
| Atlanta Period 1 | P+ | P- | Nashville Period 1 | P+ | P- | |
| Golden Tom Walsh | 5 | 7 | Ron Mexico | 7 | 5 | |
| Machine Gun Sharaf* | 8 | 6 | Moustafa ElSirty* | 6 | 8 | |
| Encyclopedia Chotranica | 8 | 7 | Timmy Brownell | 7 | 8 | |
| Total | 21 | 20 | Total | 20 | 21 | |
| Atlanta Period 2 | P+ | P- | Nashville Period 2 | P+ | P- | |
| Golden Tom Walsh | 9 | 7 | Ron Mexico | 6 | 8 | |
| Machine Gun Sharaf* | 5 | 7 | Timmy Brownell | 8 | 6 | |
| Encyclopedia Chotranica | 2 | 14 | Moustafa Elsirty* | 14 | 2 | |
| Total | 16 | 28 | Total | 28 | 16 | |
| Atlanta Period 3 | P+ | P- | Nashville Period 3 | P+ | P- | |
| Encyclopedia Chotranica | 9 | 3 | Slimmy Brownell | 0 | 9 | |
| Golden Tom Walsh | 6 | 9 | Moustafa Elsirty* | 8 | 1 | |
| Machine Gun Sharaf* | 6 | 4 | Ron Palomino | 8 | 14 | |
| Encyclopedia Chotranica* | 11 | 11 | Moustafa Elsirty* | 11 | 8 | |
| Total | 32 | 27 | Total | 27 | 32 |
MEGARALLIES: **Click the names to watch**
This entire damn match was megarallies (20 shots or more). Some players’ whole shifts consisted of nothing but megarallies and their names usually rhymed with Grolsch. Check it out:
Walsh-Palomino 3: Bombastic Side Camera
Walsh-Palomino 4: The Heat and the Humidity
Chotrani-Brownell 3: High Stakes
Walsh-Palomino 5: Is Patience Really A Virtue?
Walsh-Palomino 6 and 7: Reply hazy, ask again later
Walsh-Palomino 8 and 9: Leave it to the Ref
Walsh-Brownell 1: New Opponent, Same Result
Chotrani-Elsirty 1: LAY OUT FOR IT!
Walsh-Elsirty 1 through 8: I am Re-Thinking This Format
Walsh-Palomino 11: Why Won’t You Be a Good Boy and DIE?!
Sharaf-Palomino 3: We Are Both Over This Rally, Ref
MASSIE’S MEGARALLIES:
Sharaf-Brownell 1: Machine Gun Sniper: Not all megarallies are positional attrition battles. Some of them, even if they are only 20 shots, are just two players whaling away in the front half of the court and seeing who can Matrix the longest. I expected this out of Mohamed Sharaf, but Tim’s got some dog in him and rose to the occasion as well. Totally awesome.
Walsh-Palomino 10: Bend but Don’t Break – Here we have the exact opposite. A deliberate, grinding, cautious, controlled 37-shot rally, where both Tom and Ron played through contact and waited for that ONE opening that would finish the job. This is the kind of squash that amateurs don’t understand until it’s too late and they are dead from a heart attack.
Sharaf-Palomino 1: Mohamed Sharaf had to stop the bleeding. The 9-point Atlanta lead had evaporated, Ron Palomino had won four rallies in a row and, even worse, was every bit as stupidly tall as Sharaf. 28 shots later, however, only one of those things was still true. Momentum is absolutely a thing, and Machine Gun wrenched it back permanently for the Tornados; now I assume he’ll go date Lindsey Lohan or something.
MASSIE’S MAN OF THE MATCH:
Veer Chotrani is a classic practitioner of what I would consider the “Indian” style. Club players everywhere have seen it; an upright, languorous stance, deliberate, unconcerned, sort of oozing movement around the court, and body language that suggests that squash is maybe the fifth most important thing that the player has to do today. Make no mistake, though, this is a façade; the goal is to conserve energy until they need to suddenly extend like eight feet in a fit of explosive, rubbery violence. I’m starting to think Dhalsim from Street Fighter wasn’t an exaggeration. These are serious dudes underneath the nonchalant exterior.
Case in point: not only did Veer outlast Nashville’s highest-ranked player Brownell and win the Point of Death rally at the end of Period 1, but he recovered from a horrific 2-14 thrashing at the hands of Elsirty’s Period 2 power play and came out like a house in a tornado for the Tornados in Period 3. First, he knocked the normally unflappable Brownell from the match entirely, prompting the ghost of Jackson Bragman to possess Sean Choi and speculate that Brownell wouldn’t return because Coach Dylan “is giving (Timmy) a mouthful.” Second, in a total inversion from his normal lackadaisical protocol, Veer played his first-ever powerplay and ended Ron Palomino’s evening while putting three more points on the board. And finally, he faced down Elsirty, who was a ridiculous +17 coming into their showdown AND had the powerplay, and held him to just 11 points while scoring 8 of his own. He then walked off at the same unhurried pace, totally disinterested in the fact that he’d just beaten the entire Nashville roster one-on-one. Veer acts like he’s been there before, and after tonight, he has. That’s why he’s my Man of the Match.
FINAL THOUGHTS:
Atlanta has taken the lead in the South Division, winning their must-win home match, and now BOTH of last year’s finalists, the New York Knights and the Nashville Crushers, are 0-1. I think it’s possible that the Simon Herbert fiasco made everyone worse.
SEE YOU THIS WEEKEND FOR THE WOMEN’S NSL!
~ squash love
Jim
