Freshman intercollegiate No. 52 Garnett Booth took the first two games from No. 40 Jacques Swanepoel, 9-3 and 9-0, but Swanepoel—aided by some questionable calls by Malloy—came back to win the next three games, 9-6, 10-8 and 9-4.

“I felt like Garnett was hooked,” Whitman said. “Balls that should have been strokes were being called lets because Malloy felt like Garnett was fishing. My opinion on that is that, yeah, when someone’s fishing, you don’t give them the benefit of the doubt, but whether you’re fishing or not, a stroke’s a stroke.”

“Was he fishing? No, but he wasn’t playing balls where there was obstruction,” Whitman added. “He was just taking the space in a way that Pat doesn’t.

“Garnett was just getting hooked because I think Pat was frustrated with how many lets he was calling and he therefore wasn’t calling some strokes that should have been strokes.”

Harvard coach Satinder Bajwa declined to comment on the specific calls in question, but did address the entire refereeing system in men’s intercollegiate squash, which includes a procedure for appeal.

“We probably lost the match on that,” Bajwa said. “We are victims of how we set up our game. “The system needs to be as it is for the women [where there is no appeal]. It works very well. If it was clear-cut with one person making the calls, we wouldn’t be discussing it.”

“That would stop any questions about doubtful calls or the refereeing decisions,” Bajwa added.

Oren and Blumberg dealt junior intercollegiate No. 8 Reggie Schonborn and freshman No. 21 Eduardo Pereira their first collegiate losses.

Oren fell behind 6-2 in his first game before running off six consecutive points. Schonborn then tied the score at eight, but Oren closed out the game with a pair of strokes and then rolled over Schonborn 9-6 and 9-4 to avenge a 9-0, 9-0, 9-3 loss in the Bantams’ 7-2 regular-season win Jan. 31.

Meanwhile, Blumberg played some of his crispest, most consistent squash of the season in winning 9-0, 10-8, 9-6. With the score tied at four in the third game, Pereira caught Blumberg leaning the wrong way, but Blumberg saved himself with a shot off the back wall. Pereira later kept himself in the point with his own shot off the back wall, but Blumberg finished the point with a definitive kill to propel himself to the win.

In the second round of matches, freshman intercollegiate No. 7 Siddharth Suchde upset No. 6 Michael Ferreira at No. 2 in a hotly contested match that saw the competitors jaw with each other and complain about Oren’s stroke calls as Suchde dispatched the Trinity tri-captain 9-6, 9-3, 5-9, 9-4.

At the same time, junior intercollegiate No. 27 Asher Hochberg suffered his first loss of the season, falling in three games to No. 20 Nadeem Osman at No. 5, and co-captain Whitman—the intercollegiate No. 39—was swept by No. 29 Shaun Johnstone at No. 8.

“I was throwing my racket at balls,” Whitman said. “I was running so hard and I was trying to beat him the way I know I should play squash, and then in the second half of the second game and the third game, I had to resort to just chasing balls because I wasn’t beating him. I just said to myself, ‘If you’re going to beat me, you’re going to have to be here all day.’”

HARVARD 8, YALE 1

NEW HAVEN, Conn.—Broadbent’s five-game victory over Illingworth punctuated a convincing 8-1 Harvard win over Yale (12-3, 5-1) on Saturday afternoon.