ISDA Squash Tour 2008

Writen by Rob Dinerman
Date: November 13/07

Chastened by their pair of October losses in St. Louis and Baltimore to a severe and suddenly emergent challenger to their No. 1 standing, Paul Price and Ben Gould have restored order in a bipartite early-November salvo that has brought them to victory first in New York at the Big Apple Open and then just this past weekend in Chicago. In both cases of those latter events, the two Australian stars defeated the same British-born pairing (consisting of Chris Walker and Clive Leach) that had jolted them in the season-opening pair of tournaments. Just as Gould and Price captured the first two events of last season, in each case out-playing reigning 2005-06 No. 1’s Gary Waite and Damien Mudge in the process, only to see Waite and Midge surge to the winner’s circle in the next two ISDA events (namely Vancouver and Wilmington) last fall, so this season reigning 2006-07 No. 1’s Price and Gould, as noted, lost in each of the first two tourneys to Walker and Leach but have now responded to this threat with a pair of consecutive tournament titles. Both the Price/Gould combination entering last season and the Walker/Leach tandem coming into this season had previously played in only one event as partners, the May ’06 San Francisco tour stop in both cases, where Leach and Walker overcame a two games to love deficit to win in five in the semis before losing an 18-16 fifth-game final against Waite and Viktor Berg.
In spite of the 2-2 head-to-head match-up between these two titans (as well as the fact that each team has beaten the other once in a semi and once in a final), Walker and Leach will take over the No. 1 team position when the first in-season rankings come out this week due to their triumph at the Maryland Club Open, the only $ 30,000 event held thus far, the purse for the other three all being at the $ 25,000 level. Those two teams will be joined this weekend in a non-ranking but high-profile six-team round-robin event in Toronto by No. 3 team Mudge and Berg, finalists in New York, where they led Price/Gould 11-9 in the fifth before yielding a 6-0 match-ending run, and semifinal losers to Walker/Leach in both Baltimore and Chicago; as well as Waite (making his first appearance of the season) and Preston Quick (who with partner John Russell has reached three semis this autumn); Willie Hosey, a St. Louis finalist with Mudge while Berg recovered from a hamstring strain that is still bothering him, and Jamie Bentley (who claims that this will be his ISDA swan song after having to pull out of several early-season tournaments due to arm and knee injuries); and whoever survives a four-team qualifier draw that will be held in mid-week.
To this point, the top four teams have grabbed 15 of the 16 overall semifinal positions, the one exception occurring when Russell and Quick lost their Big Apple Open quarterfinal match against Hosey and Scott Butcher, who ended his exceptional eight-year ISDA career on that highly productive note and who along with his wife will be returning to his native Australia at year’s end in time for the birth of their first child this winter. The quarterfinal teams have been fairly stable as well, with Mark Chaloner and Michael Pirnak having progressed to (but only to) that stage in all four events (in three of which they drew Price/Gould as their quarterfinal match-up), Jeff Mulligan and Matt Jensen having progressed their three times, as has Joe Pentland, twice with Mark Price and once with Ben Howell, and James Hewitt (once each with Ayman Kerim, Butcher and Tyler Millard). So far only once has a team that made it through the qualifiers gone on to win their subsequent round of 16 main-draw match, and that was when Whitten Morris and Trevor McGuinness followed a successful Big Apple Open qualifying effort by defeating Hewitt (who sprained an ankle in mid-match) and Millard and then giving Walker and Leach plenty of resistance in a competitive albeit straight-set quarterfinal.
After Toronto and the Thanksgiving recess, the tour resumes with stops in Wilmington and Vancouver before the Christmas/New Year’s break. The seven ISDA sanctioned events that comprise the fall schedule are by far the most in the history of the Association.