Tournament Results:
Mudge And Berg Rally In St. Louis By Rob Dinerman
Safely in the saddle at 1-1, 13-7 (and then 14-9) and seemingly well on their way to going four for four this young season and in the process notching their third consecutive final-round win over their 2007-08 nemesis, Paul Price and Ben Gould instead faltered for the first time this autumn, failing to convert that quintuple-game-ball advantage (or the 6-2 lead they later held in the fourth game) and eventually falling to No. 1 seeds Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg 8-15 15-9 17-15 15-10 this past Saturday afternoon in St. Louis. Mudge and Berg, who had fallen 3-0 to Price/Gould earlier this month in both the Big Apple Open and Cambridge Club Doubles finals, engineered huge consecutive-game runs of 10-2 to close out the third game and 11-2 to go up 13-7 and essentially clinch the fourth, as the springboards to their first trip to the winner’s circle this season after eight such finishes lsat year.
Neither finalist had any difficulty advancing to that stage --- Mudge and Berg received a quarterfinal walkover from Ben Howell and James Hewitt when Howell injured himself during the warm-up, then won handily over John Russell and Preston Quick, their conquerors at the same semifinal stage at the season-opener last month in Baltimore, who had earlier three-gamed qualifiers Eric Vlcek and Yvain Badan. For their part, Gould and Price extended their string of consecutive 3-0 wins to six (dating back to the Big Apple Open final) in their pre-final triumphs over the Joe Pentland/Raj Nanda and Willie Hosey/Mark Chaloner duos, though Hosey/Chaloner had first authored the most noteworthy result of the entire weekend with their 3-2 quarterfinal victory over No. 4 seed Clive Leach (who won this tournament a year ago with Chris Walker) and his new partner Matt Jenson. Hosey and Chaloner had defeated Leach/Jenson, also in five games, four days earlier in the Monday-afternoon third-place playoff in the sanctioned though non-ranking Cambridge Club event in Toronto, and the revenge-minded Leach/Jenson pair would have gone up 2-0 but for the 2nd-game tiebreaker that landed in the Hosey/Chaloner column. The latter tandem, also in their first season as partners, then took the third game but lost the fourth-set tiebreaker to a slew of Jenson winners that carried his team to a 6-2 fifth-game margin as well.
Jenson had been scoring with cross-court backhand drops off Chaloner cross-courts that were too narrow and hit from too deep in the court, but several times during the stretch run (in which Hosey/Chaloner tied the game at 10-all and then ran off four straight points for 14-10, 15-11) Hosey alertly covered that front-right region to keep his team in the point until Chaloner’s firepower and several tins off both Jenson’s and Leach’s racquet decided the outcome, which simultaneously ushered Chaloner into his first-ever ISDA ranking-tournament semifinal and marked Leach’s first pre-semis elimination in more than two years. More pertinently, this result, coming on the heels of Hosey/Chaloner’s Toronto tallies in both that third-place match and in a Pools win over Russell and Quick, means that the top echelon now runs five teams deep as opposed to only four.
That said, the TOP of the top-echelon might consist of only TWO teams, namely Mudge/Berg and Price/Gould, who have now combined to fill seven of the eight final-round spots so far in this tour after previously facing each other in four of the five events that both teams entered from mid-January onwards last season. So often these matches swing on a close end-game or two (Mudge/Berg had to rally from behind to win fourth- and fifth-set tiebreakers in the Kellner Cup final last spring; Price/Gould went from 8-12 to 16-14 in the second game in New York three weeks ago, and they won the second game in Toronto 15-13 when Berg tinned a would-be winner at 13-14), due to how closely matched these teams are, and that was certainly the case in St. Louis in the third game, when at 14-9 Gould (who had been so error-free all fall) tinned a drive, an innocuous-appearing miscue that was followed by another tin, then a daring Berg winner. Suddenly the score had tightened up and Berg and Mudge, sensing an opening, raised their game enough to get to and then through the best-of-five overtime.
When Mudge and Berg launched another rally after falling behind early in the fourth game, Price and Gould possibly had flashbacks of what had happened to them late in the preceding game – certainly they were unable to prevent Mudge and Berg from surging to an insurmountable 13-7 edge that announced their determination to defend the No. 1 status that they earned last season. The final point, indicatively, ended on a front-court ball that either Gould or Price could have easily gotten to, but both froze for a moment, with each expecting the other to make the play, and by then it was too late for either to react in time. It will be interesting to see what if any carry-over there will be at the U. S. Pro event in Wilmington two weeks hence, in which Mudge and Berg won their breakthrough first title as partners last year and which constitutes the only tourney on the ISDA schedule other than Denver in which the Price/Gould team has played two times without to this point getting past the semis.