INTERVIEW: MADELINE PERRY: MARY HANNIGANtalks to the world number three player from Banbridge about hitting her peak at an age when most would be hanging up the racquet

IT WAS about five years ago Madeline Perry began giving some thought to life after her professional squash career, the then 29-year-old deciding that last October’s Commonwealth Games in India would, probably, be her final tournament.

She laughs at the “probably”; she’s not, she admits, very good at this “planning ahead” business. “I think my Dad would like me to plan,” she smiles, “but generally I avoid doing it. But, yeah, I had the Commonwealths in mind, that’s when I thought I would stop.”

It seemed a sensible enough decision. Perry, after all, would be pushing 34 when she represented Northern Ireland in Delhi, and at that age she assumed she’d be struggling to keep up with the pace and demands of professional squash. And for someone so fiercely competitive all her sporting life, that was a fade-out she did not want to endure.

Fast forward to April 2011, and Perry is in Dublin for the Irish Open (a back injury forced her to retire during her semi-final last night).

She’s talking about her schedule for the year ahead. “There’s Malaysia, Singapore, Australia in the summer, Vancouver, New Zealand, there’s a good few big tournaments. And there’s the World Championships in Rotterdam, and after that . . .”

So, there’s been a change of plan? “Yeah, I think I must be a freak of nature,” she laughs, “I’m 34 and I’m still peaking really, and there aren’t many players who peak at my age.”

Thirty-four and, really, that fade-out should be in full swing. And it should show in the world rankings: her graph should resemble a mountain with her current location on the descent towards base-camp, otherwise known as retirement.

Instead, she’s still climbing, now just steps from the summit.

She was readying herself for her latest tournament in the Cayman Islands earlier this month when her father got in touch. Back home in Banbridge he’d been looking up news of the April world rankings, and when he saw them he filled with pride. His daughter was the third ranked squash player in the world.

It was a thrill when she first broke into the top-100 in late 1998; she was elated when she cracked the top-50 in 2000, and then the top-20 three years later.

“And getting into the top-10 (in 2006) was a really big thing for me,” she says, “so top three . . . it’s still kind of weird. I really never thought I could get that far. People always told me I had the potential, but it’s so difficult to get the consistency over the years to do it.”

So, the retirement plans have been shelved? “Yeah, what’s the point in stopping?” she laughs.

No point at all. Perry has found a consistency that has elevated her from being one of her sport’s better players to being one of its very best. Only the peerless Nicol David, the Malaysian who has been world number one for 60 successive months, and England’s Jenny Duncalf are ranked above her.

A browse through her record from the last couple of years shows just how remarkably consistent she has been, rarely failing to reach the last eight in events, often getting to semi-finals and finals.

In 2009, she reached the final of the British Open, inflicting a rare defeat on David in the quarter-finals – the world champion had won 18 of her previous 20 tournaments. Having lost to David in their 14 previous meetings, that victory made her believe anything was possible.

The highlight, though, came last year at Canberra’s Royal Theatre where she won the Australian Open, beating Duncalf in the semi-finals, before saving two match balls against England’s Alison Waters to win her first “gold event”.

“And the amazing thing was, it just felt so easy. Physically too, I felt better than I ever did, but I’ve worked harder and harder every year. It is difficult to explain, though, but I just seem to have gotten a bit better every year. The other girls on the tour are all younger, but I’ve stayed with them, or gone above them at times.

“But squash is one of those sports where you get better as you get older, definitely. It’s quite a mental, tactical game, manoeuvring your opponents around the court. It’s like chess. That’s years and years of learning, and there’s a lot of learning to do.”

She was a sporting all-rounder as a young girl, “hockey, tennis, football, a bit of everything”, but she began to focus on squash after joining her local club in Banbridge. She didn’t take it too seriously though, despite early successes. It was only when she was coming towards the end of her geography degree at Queen’s University that she saw the opportunity to turn her sporting hobby in to a career.

“The whole funding thing started happening around that stage, so I thought I’d give it a go for a year. Then, after a year, I decided I’d see if I could get into the top-50, then it was another year, and another year,” she laughs.

“I was this little girl from Northern Ireland going out on the world tour, there were no other Irish players, I was very shy, so I can’t believe how quickly I settled in to it. I felt comfortable playing at that level, I’ve always had that self belief – my confidence goes up and down, but my self-belief is always there. So deep down I knew I could be good.”

She moved to Halifax in Yorkshire, the club there providing “a professional environment” and better quality players to train with and play against. She teamed up with coach Marcus Berrett and “there were instant rewards from the move”.

And steadily she progressed, finally reaching that top-10 goal in March 2006. A year later she had edged up to eighth, but a year after that she had dropped to 16th.

It wasn’t a loss of form, though, it was as a result of an horrific incident in Milan when she was knocked unconscious as she left a restaurant where she had dined with friends.

She remembered nothing of the incident, only waking up in a hospital ward. Her friends had found her lying on the ground “with blood coming out of my ear”. “My handbag was gone, so I could have been mugged, but nobody saw anything.”

The temporal bone in her skull was broken and she also suffered bleeding and bruising to the brain. The medical staff wouldn’t clear her to fly home because “I had a bubble of air close to my brain”, so she set off on a marathon journey home.

“Me and Mum had to get trains, buses, boats all the way back to Belfast. It was terrible.

“But I was plotting my comeback straight away,” she laughs. “And I was back playing within three months. I wasn’t great for about a year, though, I wasn’t as quick or sharp. It was really frustrating, because when you’re at that level, in the top-10, you just can’t afford to drop off. It took me a while to work my way back up.”

But she regained lost ground, and then some.

“Missing some big tournaments was hard to take,” she said at the time. “It’s like for an electrician or anyone – I wasn’t earning because I hadn’t been working.”

But she makes a “good” living now, she says, “partly because I’m funded, and then there’s sponsorship and prize money. It’s fine.

“There’s a bit of a gap between our tour and the men’s, the last couple of years especially. Our tour is reasonably successful, but theirs has gone to another level, partly because there’s a huge amount of money for them in the Middle East, which we can’t get at. We can go to Qatar, but Saudi Arabia is out for us. That’s big money for them.”

That’s a source of frustration, but nothing irks her more than the continuing absence of squash from the Olympic Games. “I’m very bitter about it, I don’t even know if I’ll watch the Olympics next summer. I’ve lost all respect for the IOC, to be honest. The sports that have been allowed in? Rugby sevens? That isn’t a sport. And golf? What’s that got to do with the Olympic ideal?

“They’re just not interested because they don’t think squash would make them enough money. And that’s what the IOC is all about, making money. They just think ‘well, they’re not famous athletes’, but that’s a vicious circle – we’re not on TV, which is why we’re not famous.

“But it’s such a worldwide sport, huge in Asia and parts of the Middle East – but not in America or China, which are two huge markets, especially for the IOC. Something like golf has the resources – and they get Tiger Woods to say he wants to play in the Olympics. I’m sure he’s not that bothered. It’s just not the pinnacle of these people’s sports.

“I think it effects me more now because I’m world number three, I’d have had a chance of an Olympic medal. It’s the biggest disappointment, really, it would have meant everything.”

London 2012 might, then, have been the dream place to bow out, although in light of her current form Perry is reluctant to talk of retirement again. “I don’t really know what’s ahead. I’ll just wait and see how it goes, another year or two, maybe.

“I think I’m prepared for it. I’ve spoken to a couple of people who have retired, one of them said the most difficult thing was not being able to control how much money he made. If you’re in a normal job you’ve got your wage for the year, it doesn’t matter how hard you work you still get the same amount of money – unless you’re in a bank getting a million pound bonus. I never thought of that. We’re used to working really hard and getting rewards for that. We’re so driven, the goals we set, it’s going to be hard not to have that.

“And my Dad was saying to me the other day, ‘When you retire will you not play any tournaments at all?’ And that made me think, my Mum and Dad are going to miss it too, it’s been 20 years of their lives as well, following results and rankings. So it has an impact on everyone around you, it’s not just about yourself.

“I come up with all sorts of ideas about what I might do – a personal trainer was one, and recently I was thinking about journalism. I quite enjoy writing and I know a lot about sport. I know I have to think about it because it is near. I can’t just stop and sit there.

“But I don’t really like to think about the future – you know, when you like your life so much you don’t really want to go anywhere else? That’s how it is for me.”