Tournament Results:
Price And Gould Win Their Second Consecutive Cambridge Club Title By Rob Dinerman
In an impressive display of constant pressure and shot-making precision, Paul Price and Ben Gould rolled through the six-team Cambridge Club Doubles without dropping a single game to successfully defend the title they won in a dominant final a year ago over Clive Leach and Chris Walker. It was the fourth Cambridge Club winning effort for Price, who also won this event twice playing with the now-retired Jamie Bentley, the head pro of the host club, earlier this decade.
The format of this sanctioned though non-ranking event for the past several years has been to have two three-team round-robins, with the respective winners squaring off in the finals while the two respective No. 2’s go into the third-place playoff. Price and Gould swept past first John Russell and Preston Quick, their final-round opponents last month in the season-opener in Baltimore, and then Willie Hosey and Mark Chaloner. In the other bracket, Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg out-played both the Leach/Matt Jenson and the Jonathon Power/Josh McDonald tandems. Then, as they had done two weeks earlier in the Big Apple Open final in New York, Price and Gould rose superior in straight games to Mudge and Berg, their North American Open, Heights Casino and Kellner Cup final-round conquerors this past winter/spring, by a score of 15-12 (from 12-all after Price/Berg had led 9-5), 15-13, 15-10. After a high-quality first game, the match ended with a sub-par final pair of games marked by excessive pushing (especially on the right wall) and many arguments amidst hotly disputed calls. Price’s sharp-shooting remained at a high level even with all the play stoppages, which clearly seemed to play a role in an increasingly-frustrated Berg’s high tin count, the most damaging of which occurred on the 13-14 point in that close second game, when he badly erred on a daring backhand cross-court drop attempt that landed in the middle of the tin.
Undoubtedly the most noteworthy results of the three-day competition were registered by the two-time (with Power and Todd Binns) Cambridge Club champion Hosey and the 2002 (with Gary Waite) titlist Chaloner, playing in only their third event together after partnering up at the beginning of this season. They defeated the higher-ranked Quick and Russell in five to qualify for the third-place match, which they won, also in five, at the expense of Leach and Jenson. Russell and Quick have only lost two matches to a team not in the top-three since the end of the 2006-07 season, and now Hosey (who teamed up with Scott Butcher to beat them in the quarters of last year’s Big Apple Open) has co-authored both of those setbacks. In both the Maryland Club and Big Apple Opens, the top-four seeded teams have reached the semis – continuing a pattern in 2007-08 in which the top four went a combined 60-1 against the rest of the ISDA field, that Hosey/Butcher upset of Russell/Quick comprising the “1” in 60-1 --- and, based on this pair of 3-2 wins this past weekend in Toronto, it appears that of the Nos. 5 through 8 teams, Hosey and Chaloner seem more capable than anyone else of breaking through to the semis when the ranking portion of the ISDA tour resumes this coming weekend in St. Louis