Julian Cash and Henry Patten: Meet the most successful doubles team in 2022 after record 10 ATP Challenger titles

This time last year Julian Cash and Henry Patten had never played doubles together. Neither had even played a main-draw match on the second-tier ATP Challenger Tour.

At this exact time last year, Cash was playing an ITF World Tennis Tour tournament in Tunisia and Patten had just finished up playing an ITF event in Greece. Cash was ranked at No. 903 in the world in singles and No. 585 in the world in doubles. Patten was at No. 695 in singles and No. 871 in doubles.

Who would have predicted that a year on, they would both be ranked inside the top 70 in doubles, having won an ATP Challenger record 10 titles together?

“Everything’s happened pretty quickly,” Cash tells Eurosport with a smile.

Cash and Patten have known each other for a while. Both 26, they came up at the same time through the British junior circuit and played college tennis in America. But it wasn’t until this year that they finally got the chance to team up.

“We’d both done well in college and kind of always wanted to play together,” says Cash. “But with our focus on singles, it never really came to anything. We were always in different countries, basically.”

The opportunity finally arose as Cash and Patten were both playing a run of four ITF events in Nottingham starting in April. They made the semi-finals in their first event together then won the next three, followed by another title run in Greece, and another in their debut tournament on the ATP Challenger Tour in Surbiton, beating two top-50 ranked doubles players in the final.

“The first one was pretty surreal,” reflects Cash. “Neither of us had played a Challenger before and that was a strong field. So to win that was unreal.”

How did it click so quickly?

Cash says a crash course with Louis Cayer – one of the most successful doubles coaches ever who currently works with the Lawn Tennis Association – helped lay the foundations.

“When me and Henry agreed to finally play, I gave Louis a call and asked if he would be happy to do a session with us. He fit us in and we ended up doing like three hours back to back with no drink, like just kind of full steam ahead and churned everything out. And that was a huge start for us.

“We had never played together, so to get us on the same page from ball one was huge for us, and we were able to use some of that stuff like quite early on and it was a good chance for us to get better on a lot of the skills and a lot of the game plans that he was teaching us. That was a really good foundation for us to kind of push on.”

Cash and Patten followed up their Surbiton victory with a run to the final in Nottingham and then a second Challenger title in Ilkley. They played their first ATP Tour event together – losing in the opening round to the top-50 pair they beat in the Surbiton final – and played together at Wimbledon. A switch to the North American hard courts took a bit of adjustment, but soon they were on the winning path again.

“A lot of people were kind of talking and being like ‘oh well they can only do well on grass’, so it was nice to get that first title and I guess prove some of that wrong,” says Cash.

The first hard-court title came in Granby, Canada. More followed in Columbus, Fairfield, Las Vegas, Charlottesville, Drummondville, Italy and finally on clay in Portugal. By winning their ninth doubles title in just seven months together they broke the previous Challenger Tour season record of eight. They have also put themselves in with a chance of making it to Australia next month, but are waiting to see if they will make the doubles cut based on their rankings for the ATP 250s and the Australian Open before finalising travel plans.

Cash and Patten are currently ranked fifth and sixth among British doubles players. Neal Skupski is at No. 1 in the world along with partner Wesley Koolhof, Joe Salisbury is at No. 4, Lloyd Glasspool is at No. 12, and Jamie Murray is at No. 36. Cash says having so much doubles quality around the British scene has been beneficial to him and Patten.

“We’re very lucky being from Great Britain where there has been a lot of success in recent years in doubles, right at the top of the game.

“Having that, guys that we knew, and have known for a long time, gave us a lot of confidence. And then we’ve been fortunate enough to train a couple times with Joe and Neal which has been huge for us and adds an element of excitement from watching them.

“They’re playing how we want to play. And we can see a lot of what they’re doing, like their tactics, and then implementing that stuff. It’s a lot of fun to watch them for sure.”

Cash and Patten’s remarkable success has been such that both their singles ambitions have been shelved for now – “we felt our best chance was to just bite the bullet and drop singles sooner rather than later” – and the focus is entirely on doubles. But after a whirlwind 2022, what ambitions do they have for the following season?

“I think goal one is to probably get top 50, which would get us into pretty much event on the ATP Tour other than the Masters 1000s,” says Cash.

“That would be our first goal, to cement our places in those events week in week out. But it’s tough to look really much past that, obviously, everything’s happened pretty quickly. If you would have asked me 12 months ago, where we are would not have been my goal.

“Hopefully we can defend some of our titles and get some chances to play the bigger ones as well.”

If their success in 2022 is anything to go by, Cash and Patten will be a team to keep an eye on in the years ahead.

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