ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Price And Gould Win In Vancouver by Rob Dinerman

After stumbling a week earlier in Wilmington, Paul Price and Ben Gould got back to their recent winning ways in Vancouver, where they defeated, sequentially, Michael Pirnak and Mark Chaloner (for the fifth time this autumn, in each case in the quarterfinals), Joe Pentland and Mark Price and, in the final, Wilmington champs Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg, who required 20 stitches after his face absorbed a Gould follow-through at 1-all, 7-all, after which he and his partner were never the same during the remaining game and a half of this four-game final. With this triumph, their third in the last four ISDA ranking tournaments after a pair of season-opening losses to Clive Leach and Chris Walker, Price and Gould (who also captured the non-ranking Bentley Cup title in Toronto) will head into the month-long holiday break having reclaimed the No. 1 team ranking which they had briefly surrendered to Leach and Walker. The tour resumes in mid-January with important tournaments in Boston and Greenwich, whose ’07 editions both were won by Price and Gould. This Vancouver event was the first eight-team draw of the season (all the others had either 12 main-draw teams or 16) and the first which didn’t have a qualifying round due to lack of entries. The semifinal meeting between the eventual champs and the Pentland/Mark Price duo marked the first time in ISDA history that two brothers had opposed each other as late as the semifinal round, as well as the first time that either Pentland or Price, both of whom had come close several times in the past (including leading John Russell and Preston Quick 11-7 in the fifth in St. Louis in October before yielding an 8-0 match-closing run), had ever reached an ISDA semi. Pentland and Price advanced to that stage by defeating Gary Waite and Jeff Mulligan in straight games, staying away from Waite as much as possible and pressuring Mulligan at every opportunity. Meanwhile, in the bottom half, Willie Hosey, pinch-hitting for Walker (who was in Chennai, India, fulfilling his role as head coach of the USA men’s team, which was participating in the biennial World Team Championships) and Leach, who had won the 2004 Big Apple Open and reached the 2005 North American Open final when they were regular partners a few years ago, out-played James Hewitt and Tyler Millard before falling in four to Mudge and Berg, first-round winners over Darren Thompson and Winston Cabell. The final, as noted, was dead even through two and a half games until the unfortunate accident on the right wall, after which, when play resumed following a substantial hiatus while Berg was stitched up, Price and Gould rolled unimpeded through the remainder of the match.

Draw