ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Mudge And Berg Defend Boston Crown By Rob Dinerman

Trailing 1-1, 10-6 in their final against inspired opponents who seemed well on their way to a second consecutive upset win, Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg surged out of that hole with a determined 9-0 game-ending run that proved the linchpin to an eventual 15-16 15-12 15-10 10-15 15-10 victory over Matt Jenson and Clive Leach that enabled Mudge and Berg to successfully defend the Boston title they had won in 2008. It marked the sixth such New England win for Mudge (who had succeeded in the two-court confines of the University Club of Boston with Gary Waite in 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2005) and the third for Berg, who with Josh McDonald had rallied from 11-14 to 17-15 in the fifth game in 2004 at the final-round expense of Mudge and Waite.

   The final marked the second five-game match in as many days for Leach and Jenson, who had burst out of their late-autumn slump (which had included first-round losses in each of the previous two ISDA tour stops in St. Louis and Wilmington) with a sensational 16-15 semifinal victory over 2007 Boston champions Paul Price and Ben Gould. Leach, a Boston finalist with both Michael Pirnak in 2006 and with Chris Walker last year), and Jenson benefited first from a nick-finding Leach three-wall serve-return at 12-13 that forced the best-of-five fifth-game tiebreaker, and then from a pair of highly-unusual circumstances that caused the final two points to land in their column from double-match-ball-against: at 1-2, set-three, Jenson over-hit a wild cross-court so badly that the ball barely stayed under the back-wall out-of-bounds line --- and then ran so tightly along the right wall that Gould couldn’t steer it back into play.

   Then, on simultaneous-match-point, a Price backhand cross-court semi-nicked in front of Leach, who miraculously reacted just in time to muster a return which, however, hung in mid-court, a sitter for Price, who had the whole front-left open with Leach on the right wall and Jenson stuck in back. Price confidently moved forward to put the ball away, but on his final stride his right lower-leg cramped up so severely that he pitched forward, able to manage only a desperate and disoriented swing that whiffed completely on the ball, a bizarre and incongruous ending to what had been a wonderfully entertaining and well-played match that presented Leach and Jenson with their first trip to an ISDA final this season. Price and Gould, currently ranked No. 1 based on the three-straight tournament wins (i.e. Baltimore, New York and Toronto) that they had secured to open the 2008-09 season, have now lost to each of the three teams behind them (namely Mudge/Berg, Jenson/Leach and John Russell/Preston Quick, whom Mudge and Berg defeated in three games in the balancing Boston semi), which is a testament to the depth of the current pro circuit – so too is the fact that no fewer than five of the tournament’s 11 main-draw matches, including three of the four round-of-16 tilts, had to be resolved with a fifth game.

   As noted, the last and best of these was the final, the first game of which ended with two spectacular left-waller winners in a row, with a Mudge dead-roll three-wall winner forcing a simultaneous-game-point that was decided by a Jenson overhead that found a front-right nick in front of Berg. This exchange was a microcosm of the entire match, which took more than two hours to complete and was characterized by an extraordinarily high quality of play and courageous shot-making, even on the lively host courts. The match especially took a toll on the two left-wall protagonists, with Mudge sucking wind after several lengthy points and Jenson (who committed some tins down the stretch) visibly starting to cramp up. All of the top contenders came away from the weekend with some momentum behind them and something to shoot for as well heading into one of the biggest prizes of the entire season, the North American Open, in Greenwich just 10 days away.