ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Price And Gould Surge To Maryland Club Open Title By Rob Dinerman

  October 21 ---   A surprisingly across-the-board competitive first full-ranking tournament of the 2008-09 ISDA pro doubles tour – in which fully half of each main-draw round’s matches went the full five games prior to the final – culminated in a Maryland Club Open final this past Monday evening in which Paul Price and Ben Gould prevailed 15-3 13-15 15-8 15-4 over John Russell and Preston Quick in a same-result rematch of the ’06 final. In making this triumphant return to the site of their first-ever tour title two years ago, Price and Gould banished the bad memory of last year’s Baltimore final-round meltdown (they led Chris Walker and Clive Leach 2-1, 11-8 before being overtaken) and started the current season with a strong statement about their intentions of regaining the No. 1 ISDA ranking they attained in 2006-07 before being displaced from that standing by Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg last season.

  The latter top-seeded pairing, finalists (at least) in each of the last 10 post-Thanksgiving stops on last year’s ISDA tour (winning eight of them) but straight-set semifinal losers to Leach and Walker a in this event a year ago, were out of sorts and out of synch even in their 3-1 quarterfinal win over Walker and Jonny Smith, and they were sloppy and error-prone in the ensuing semi against Russell and Quick, who had weathered some quarterfinal difficulty of their own in a five-game quarter over Eric Vlcek and Yvain Badan but were determined and consistent in their four-game win over Mudge and Berg, against whom Russell and Quick had gone winless in nearly a half-dozen meetings last season. Vlcek and Badan, winners of the season-opening Challenger tourney (for players ranked out of the top 10) in Pittsburgh a few weeks ago, survived a fourth-game match-ball-against predicament in their Baltimore round-of-16 tilt with Michael Ferreira and Whitten Morris. Meanwhile, Leach and his new partner Matt Jenson had a pair of successive five-game marathons of their own, the first in a testing quarter over Mark Price and Joe Pentland, and the second an entertaining semi under Price and Gould, who however drew ahead midway through the 15-9 fifth game.

  It was to be the only and last scare of the weekend for the eventual champs, who dominated their Russell/Quick final save for a slight letdown in the second game. Russell and Quick have given Price and Gould plenty of trouble in the recent past – they defeated them twice last season, in Wilmington and Denver, and would have had a third win had they been able to convert the 11-7 fifth-game lead they held in a Brooklyn semi --- but on this occasion they spent most of the night under fire.  Either way, it was a solid opening salvo from Price and Gould, who now have fired the first shot of what figures to be an exciting October to May ISDA campaign.