ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Mudge And Berg Win Kellner Cup by Rob Dinerman

Trailing 2-1, 12-9, Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg rallied to a thrilling 10-15 15-9 10-15 16-15 16-13 victory over arch-rivals Paul Price and Ben Gould in the final round of the $ 70,000 Kellner Cup in New York City in a match in which the No. 1 end-of-season team ranking, the top winner’s purse of the year and one of the most coveted trophies that the ISDA tour has to offer were all squarely on the line. By winning this defining match of the 2007-08 season (on three early-point Price/Gould fifth-game overtime tins), Mudge and Berg, who saved double-match-point-against in the fourth-set best-of-five tiebreaker and who trailed 13-12 in both the fourth and fifth games, thereby notched their tour-leading seventh title of the current campaign and reached their ninth consecutive ISDA ranking-tournament final (and tenth overall) in this, their first season as partners following the retirement last spring of Mudge’s long-time partner Gary Waite, with whom Mudge had won six of the seven Kellner Cup tourneys that had been held prior to this ’08 edition. Proof of the extent to which the two final-round teams have dominated the current tour (which will end this coming weekend with a debut event in Sea Island, Georgia) lies in the fact that one of these tandems (who have now split their six head-to-head meetings) has won every event this entire season save for the October stops in St. Louis and Baltimore, both of which went to Clive Leach and Chris Walker, who led Price and Gould 10-7 in the fourth game of the bottom-half Kellner Cup semi, seemingly well positioned to force a fifth game, before a Price/Gould 7-1 run keyed their eventual 15-12 win. In the balancing semifinal, Mudge and Berg had to arm-fight their way through a second-game tiebreaker session en route to their straight-set victory over Preston Quick and John Russell. These four teams have been virtually upset-proof all season (suffering only one combined loss to a non-top-four team, when Russell/Quick fell to Willie Hosey and Scott Butcher in an early-November Big Apple Open quarter), usually (as was the case this past weekend as well) making the quarterfinal matches (Mudge/Berg over Hosey/Matt Jenson, Russell/Quick over James Hewitt/Mark Chaloner, Walker/Leach over Joe Pentland/Mark Price and Paul Price/Gould over Michael Pirnak/Jeff Mulligan) fairly routine affairs. In fact, the entire tournament went according to pre-tournament expectation, with no upsets and, with the emphatic exception of the final, very few close matches. All four qualifying teams were eliminated on schedule in the round of 16, whose eight matches contained only one five-gamer, that occurring when Pentland and Mark Price, consistent quarterfinalists all season long, were forced to surmount a two-game deficit to reach that stage, which they did when they overtook Steve Scharff and Ayman Karim. The best other first-round main-draw match pitted Silver Racquets and Gold Racquets winners Whitten Morris and Michael Ferreira against Russell/Quick, who lost the second game by one point (when a Morris cross-court blast handcuffed Russell) and frittered away most of a 14-8 lead in close-out fourth game before a Quick drive down the right wall at 14-13 barely eluded Morris’s diving attempt to get his racquet on the wall-clinging ball.

Draw