ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Price And Gould Regain North American Open Title By Rob Dinerman

--- Emphatically ending a two-month tournament-winning drought following a torrid three-for-three start to the current ISDA schedule, top seeds Paul Price and Ben Gould overwhelmed defending champions Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg three games to love at the Greenwich Field Club yesterday afternoon in the final round of the North American Open Doubles championship. In so doing, Price and Gould avenged their final-round loss to Mudge and Berg in mid-November the last time these two teams have met, as well as the Greenwich outcome at the same stage of the draw a year ago, while depriving Mudge, who was playing for the 10^th consecutive year in the final round of this coveted championship, the ninth such title he was seeking.

   That four-game ’08 result had enabled Mudge/Berg to wrest the No. 1 ranking (which they never relinquished for the balance of the 2007-08 season) away from Price/Gould, which would also have occurred if Mudge and Berg had prevailed this past weekend. Instead, Price and Gould were able to fend their chief rivals off, and  win their second North American Open crown in the past three years in the process, by convincingly taking the first two 15-9, 15-7 games of the final and coming away with a 16-15 close-out third game when a Mudge tin concluded the final exchange.

   The tournament overall progressed in remarkably upset-free fashion, with both successful qualifying teams (namely Raj Nanda/Alex Langerhorst and Michael Ferreira/Whitten Morris) into the 12-team main-draw losing right away (to Willie Hosey/Mark Chaloner and Eric Vlcek/Yvain Badan respectively), with all four seeded teams reaching the semis (three quarterfinal matches went in straight sets, the only exception being the two-love lead that Hosey/Chaloner earned over John Russell and Preston Quick, who however then won three single-figure games) and with No. 1 seeds Price and Gould avenging their two-week-old simultaneous-match-point loss to Matt Jenson and Clive Leach and No. 2 seeds Berg and Mudge out-playing Russell and Quick in a pair of four-game semis.

   The last time there has been an ISDA final without either the Mudge/Berg or Price/Gould pairings was the opening event of the 2007-08 campaign, in which Leach and Chris Walker defeated Hosey (pinch-hitting for an injured Berg) and Mudge in St. Louis. These two titans have met in the finals of four of the eight sanctioned tourneys so far this season, with Price and Gould now holding a 3-1 edge. The tour will resume in early-February in Cleveland, with stops also slated later that month at the Racquet Club in Philadelphia (a “Challenger” event for players ranked out of the top 10) and at Heights Casino in Brooklyn.