I am delighted to welcome today, Marwan ElShorbagy. He's reached number three in the world, and he’s won many titles and many matches. He is such an interesting player to watch, and this chat just takes so many cool directions and divergences. We go down a few interesting rabbit holes. We do touch on his older brother, Mohamed and how it has been competing with him, how it was playing the World Open final against your brother and the processes behind that. There's a couple of mutual friends we have, and I think you're really if for a treat in this episode. We obviously get serious as well, and we go deep with certain parts of the mind and his mindset and how it's evolved over different parts of his career. How coming to England at a young age really formed him and created arguably his mental toughness because of his environment and being under the tutelage of Jonah Barrington and having his brother Mohamed there. I think Mohamed was top ten in the world at 19 years old and Marwan is a few years younger than that. Having that as a training partner really lent itself to the mental side of the game. We talk about his relationship with Danny Massaro, who I've had the pleasure to have on the SquashMind podcast series before, and we had a great chat about the mind, and Danny was kind enough to put us together. We go on to talk about his visualisation process and what this entails. And as you're aware, SquashMind is really big on visualisation and understanding how to incorporate this into players games. He gives some really cool insights in regard to how he does some ghosting, and he really brings visualisation into that process, how he was visualising when he was at a bit of a low point in his career, how he was able to put things in place for himself to be mentally tougher, be mentally stronger at those moments. We also investigate his style of play. I put across what I thought and that he plays like that smart tactician, putting the ball in the right places. But he gives us the real insight into what his game is based on how he goes about his business, what he's really trying to prioritise and his role models as he was growing up and developing his game and the players he liked to emulate and look up to. There are so many nuggets that people can take away from this and so many little gems, getting inside the mind of a current pro, someone who's competing at the highest level of the game at the moment, really trying to push on to win some titles and get himself right at the top of the world rankings, which he is. But to get him arguably to number one in the world, to win a World Championship and the way he speaks, the way he talks, the way he looks at the game, he's a very wise thinker. You can tell he thinks about things a lot, and it's going to be fascinating to see what's going to happen over the next few years or so, how he's going to develop and how he's going to hopefully reach those top parts of the world. As you can probably tell from the chat coming up, it was fun with lots of laughter and I hope you enjoy this deep dive into the mindset of Marwan ElShorbagy.

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