ISDA Squash Tour 2008

Writen by Rob Dinerman
Date: December 11/07

With victories in four of the last five tournaments (in New York, Chicago, Toronto, which was sanctioned but non-ranking, and Vancouver) on the seven-event ISDA fall ’07 schedule, Paul Price and Ben Gould have regained both their winning ways and the No. 1 ISDA team ranking going into the month-long holiday break before the tour resumes in Boston and Greenwich in January. Clive Leach and Chris Walker, who briefly displaced the two gun-slinging Aussies from that slot by defeating them in both season-opening tourneys in St. Louis and Baltimore, are now in second place, with Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg, champions of the early-December U. S. Pro Championship in Wilmington, now the No. 3 team, just ahead of Wilmington finalists John Russell and Preston Quick, who provided the only interruption to the recent Price/Gould winning skein when they nosed them out in a fifth-set tiebreaker Wilmington semi.
These four tandems have effectively comprised an aristocracy that sits atop the ISDA tour, having gone a combined 24-1 against the rest of the ISDA field in those seven tournaments, the only blemish occurring during the early-November Big Apple Open, when Scott Butcher, in the last appearance of a very praiseworthy seven-year ISDA career before his planned permanent late-December return to his native Australia, and Willie Hosey defeated Russell and Quick. Price and Gould have gone 3-2 against Walker and Leach, whose only loss to any other team came when they were edged out, 15-13 in the fifth, by Mudge and Berg (against whom Walker/Leach had previously gone 3-0 this season), while Russell and Quick were, as noted, ousting (again, barely) Price and Gould.
Mudge, who with his Wilmington win joined Quick as the only players in the eight-year history of the Association to win an ISDA ranking tournament on each wall, has also been to a combined three additional finals (in St. Louis with Hosey and in New York and Vancouver with Berg), while the Walker/Leach duo complemented their St. Louis and Baltimore titles (featuring in each case rallying wins from way behind against Price/Gould) with runner-up placements in Chicago and Toronto, losing to Price and Gould in each instance.
The most consistently performing team behind this fearsome foursome has been first-year partners Michael Pirnak and Mark Chaloner, finalists in the 2002 Cambridge Club Doubles in their only tournament together prior to this fall, who have gotten to (but never to this point through) the quarterfinals of every ranking tournament in this the first season of their partnership. Matt Jensen and Jeff Mulligan have lost only once prior to the quarters in their five forays, as has James Hewitt, a quarterfinalist three times with Tyler Millard as well as once each with Butcher and Ayman Kerim. Joe Pentland and Mark Price, who saw an 11-7 fifth-game lead against Russell/Quick in a St. Louis quarterfinal evaporate in the face of an 8-0 match-saving run, attained the semis (for the first time in either of their respective careers) in Vancouver when they defeated Mulligan and Gary Waite; Pentland had also reached the quarters in Baltimore with Price and in Chicago with Ben Howell, when they beat current U. S. Nationals A’s, Silver Racquets and Gold Racquets champs Whitten Morris and Michael Ferreira.
In retrospect, the defining crossroads moment of the current season may have come on a humid early-November Monday evening in Manhattan when Mudge and Berg, who had already survived a pair of fourth-game match-balls against them, stood at 11-9 against Price and Gould in the fifth game of the Big Apple Open final. At that stage Price and Gould, who notwithstanding their 2006-07 season-end No. 1 team ranking hadn’t won an ISDA event since early this past February preceding an injury-ridden and disappointing spring, were on the verge of blowing their third substantial late-match lead in as many events to that point of the season, having failed to convert margins of 2-0, 14-9 (!) against Walker/Leach in a St. Louis semi and of 2-1, 11-8 against Walker/Leach in the Baltimore final.
Another loss might well have been permanently demoralizing, and Mudge and Berg seemed right on the cusp of inflicting exactly that outcome. But Price and Gould responded to both those bad memories of the recent past and their very formidable opponents of the immediate present with a 6-0 run resulting both in a successful retention of that trophy and a degree of momentum that they have carried and built upon in the months that have followed. Whether that will continue will likely constitute the primary story line of the winter and spring months that lie ahead.