ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Price/Gould Make It Two In A Row by Rob Dinerman

Still riding the momentum of their Big Apple Open triumph six days earlier in New York, top seeds Paul Price and Ben Gould swept through the draw at the inaugural Metrosquash Pro-Am Championship in Chicago, capping off their successful weekend with a 15-10, 11and 13 victory over Chris Walker and Clive Leach in the final. In so doing, the two Australian stars evened their record this season against Walker/Leach at 2 and 2 and reasserted their top-level status after their early-season travails in St. Louis and Baltimore last month. In contrast to the fairly straight-forward Price/Gould march to the final (which consisted of a pair of 3-1 wins over first Michael Pirnak/Mark Chaloner and then John Russell/Preston Quick), Walker and Leach had to weather a pair of testing challenges, which may have influenced the course of the ensuing final. The two British-born, New York-based perforners, who defeated Price/Gould in a St. Louis semi and the Baltimore final before losing to them in the semis of the Big Apple Open, trailed Jeff Mulligan and Matt Jensen, two games to one, before upping the pace in the decisive fourth and fifth games. They then out-played Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg three-love, though the first two games were both one-pointers: Walker made an amazing adjustment to a Mudge forehand drive, responding while stretched-out with a shallow backhand rail winner in front of Berg to seal the first game, while Leach cracked a forehand rail past Berg that Mudge had no chance to track down on simultaneous-game-ball in the second. The early rounds contained several intriguing aspects, most notably (1) the appearance of tournament chairman David Kay, an ISDA finalist nearly a dozen times during the early 2000's before he decamped from New York to Chicago to become Executive Director of Metrosquash, who showed glimpses of his prime-years excellence before he and Ayman Kerim lost to Pirnak/Chaloner in four; and (2) the five-game round of 16 win by Joe Pentland and Ben Howell over Michael Ferreira and Whitten Morris. The latter pairing, U. S. National Doubles A champions each of the past two years, were coming off the Silver Racquets title they captured just one week prior to Chicago, and were thought to be ready for a breakthrough win in an ISDA setting. But, after handily winning the third and fourth games against Pentland/Howell, they tinned themselves into a sizable hole early on in the fifth, and were never able to mount a serious rally as that game moved along to an anticlimactic single-figure conclusion.

Draw