ISDA Squash Tour 2008

Gould and Price Consolidate Their Standing

Writen by Rob Dinerman
Date: February 10/07

By gaining their fourth victory in as many meetings in the Briggs Cup final this past Monday night against the team that had dominated the ISDA tour throughout its seven-year history prior to this season, Paul Price and Ben Gould not only earned the winner’s check of by far the most lucrative event of the season ($ 100,000, more than double the main-draw purse of any other tour stop), they also made off with this coveted title and, most importantly, they clearly confirmed that they had firmly displaced Gary Waite and Damien Mudge as the best doubles team in the game.

The Briggs Cup trophy was the fifth that Price and Gould have captured this season (preceded by their title-taking exploits in Baltimore in October, New York in November and Greenwich and Boston in January) in ISDA ranking-tournament play of the seven such events that have taken place so far this season. Waite and Mudge won in Vancouver (which Gould missed to fulfill a family commitment) shortly before Thanksgiving and in Wilmington in early December, when Price and Gould suffered their only loss of the season to Chris Walker and Viktor Berg, who led 2-0, 12-7 before Price defaulted with an injured knee. Price also combined with Jamie Bentley to take the non-ranking but prestigious Cambridge Club tourney in Toronto, a six-team, round-robin invitational which matches partners up as opposed to having players choose their own partners.

Waite and Mudge, who had never lost more than twice overall in any season, much less four times to the same team, and who in fact had been defeated only seven times (only twice before the finals) in their 78 ISDA forays prior to the current campaign, have gone undefeated (15-0) against everyone other than Price/Gould. But they are showing the toll their many years on the grinding ISDA circuit have taken on them, in the form of both injuries (Mudge played the Briggs Cup final with a bad shoulder, Waite did so with a fractured left-side rib) and a vulnerability in the end-stages of crucial games that had always previously been precisely when they were at their best.

Their Big Apple Open final-round defeat at the hands of Price/Gould was a 15-11, 11 and 7 wipe-out that ended less than 45 minutes after it began, but their other three losses (in the Maryland Club Open semis and the North American Open and Briggs Cup finals) all swung on mid-match tiebreaker sessions that wound up landing in the Price/Gould column. A razor-sharp look-away Price forehand roll-corner winner at simultaneous game-point in Baltimore squared that match at a game apiece and jump-started the eventual four-game outcome; Waite and Mudge led 2-0 and 13-12 in both the third and fourth games in Greenwich before losing ensuing tiebreakers and a 15-11 fifth game; and Waite and Mudge would have again led 2-0 in Rye had they not dropped a best-of-nine tiebreaker in the second game after they had won the 15-12 opener.

In fact, tiebreakers, especially one-pointers, have been a major strength of the Price/Gould tandem and an important contributing element in their success. In addition to going, as noted, 4-0 against Waite/Mudge in this critical category, they defeated Scott Butcher and Clive Leach 17-16 in the fifth game of a mesmerizing Greenwich semifinal and utilized a pair of one-point wins in the third and fourth games of their 3-1 rematch win over Butcher/Leach in a Briggs Cup semifinal. Gould and Price are 4-0 in five-game matches this season, including rallying from 1-2, 9-12 against Butcher/Leach in Greenwich and, as mentioned, trailing Waite/Mudge two games to love the next day in the final.

Of the next three teams just below the top two partnerships, Butcher and Leach have reached four semis (New York, Greenwich, Boston and Rye, where they rallied from 10-14 to 15-14 in their quarterfinal win over Walker/Berg)), as well as the Cambridge Club final, where they led Price/Bentley 2-1, 12-9 before losing in five; Preston Quick and John Russell have gone three for three against Walker and Berg, all in the semis (in Baltimore, Vancouver and Boston); and Walker and Berg, though coming up barely short several times in the same kind of 3-2 marathons that they so excelled in a year ago, were finalists in Wilmington and have been stopped short of the semis only once so far this season.

Finally, Jamie Bentley and Willie Hosey have been solid performers in this “reunion” season after their several years as the No. 2 team during the early 2000’s. Highlighting the success of these two ageless Toronto-based mid-40-somethings was Bentley’s Cambridge Club win with Price and his ascent with Hosey to the Briggs Cup semis, keyed by their upset win over Russell/Quick after their hard-fought opening-round win over recent Trinity stars Bernardo Samper and Jonny Smith.