ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Cleveland Recap: Successful Title Defense For Mudge And Berg By Rob Dinerman

February 8 --- Capping off a 10-day stretch that has vividly demonstrated the grueling nature of professional squash, especially in this midseason (and mid-winter) time of year, defending champions Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg successfully defended the Cleveland title they had won a year ago when a back injury to Paul Price forced him and partner Ben Gould to default the final Saturday night during the third game, with Mudge and Berg leading two games to love and 7-2. These two teams, who after this Cleveland outcome have each won four of the eight ISDA-sanctioned tournaments to this juncture of the season, have now met head-to-head in five of those finals, with Price/Gould (New York, Toronto and Greenwich) holding a 3-2 edge over Mudge/Berg (St. Louis and Cleveland).

Mudge and Gould have now swapped default final-round results in the past 10 days, dating back to the New York City Teaching Pro Challenge, part of the Tournament of Champions extravaganza on the four-glass-wall portable tour court at Grand Central Station in mid-town Manhattan, where a much-anticipated Jan 28^th evening final between these two Australian-born Manhattan-stars (whose only prior softball-singles confrontation went to a 10-9 fifth-game tiebreaker for Mudge) was short-circuited when Mudge that afternoon had to default due to a knee injury. In Cleveland, Mudge and Berg received a walk-over into the semis Friday night when Eric Vlcek, who had sustained a groin injury during the previous weekend’s Merion Mixed event that had forced him and his wife Marie to retire after one game of their semifinal against eventual champs (and also a husband/wife team) Alan and Kat Grant, had to therefore withdraw from Cleveland along with his ISDA partner Yvain Badan.

Mudge and Berg, who had actually been scheduled to face James Hewitt and Jonny Smith in their first-round match, received the bye (by virtue of their top-seeded standing) to the semis due to the Vlcek/Badan pull-out in a draw-change that resulted in the Hewitt/Smith tandem instead facing Preston Quick and John Russell. The latter, drained both by his O’Reilly member/guest win with James Brown at the University Club of New York early in the week, and even more so by the singles exhibition-match that he and Clive Leach had played at the grand-opening of the new singles courts at the New York Athletic Club (where both Russell and Leach are based) just 24 hours prior to Cleveland, had very little energy or mobility, as became swiftly apparent to his opponents, who opportunistically exploited this unexpected advantage and shocked the third seeds in straight sets.

Hewitt was scoring with his backhand reverse-corners, forcing Quick to abandon his right-wall post to try to help his fatigued partner cover the front-left, thereby undoing the court balance that any good team needs to maintain in order to succeed. Later on, Smith began alternating his impressive forehand power with deft backhand angled drop shots which landed for frequent winners as the 15-9 close-out third game progressed. It marked the first time in more than a year that Quick and Russell have been ousted prior to the semis, and the second time in as many attempts that Hewitt and a first-time partner have pulled off a quarterfinal upset over a top-four seed, preceded as this Ohio result was by his and Steve Scharff’s four-game victory in Wilmington over Leach and Matt Jenson in early December.

Leach and Jenson, who had avenged this loss to Hewitt/Scharff the next time they faced them in a Greenwich quarter a few weeks back, did the same this past weekend to Willie Hosey and Mark Chaloner, who had defeated them twice in November (in a Toronto third-place playoff and a few days later in a St. Louis quarterfinal) but whom Leach and Jenson overwhelmed this time around. They then battled Price and Gould (first-round winners over Hamed Anvari and Ben Howell), whom they had nosed out in an early-January simultaneous-match-point Boston semi, all the way through five arduous but entertaining games, featuring wild shifts in momentum (18-17 for Leach/Jenson in the first game, 15-2 for Price/Gould in the second) and nervy shot-making, especially from left-wallers Price and Jenson, before Price and Gould survived a 15-11 fifth game whose nervous-making and enervating course may well have played a significant role in Price’s inability to complete the final held later on during that same hectic Saturday afternoon/evening.

Mudge and Berg, though challenged themselves in a four-game balancing top-half semifinal win over Smith (an ISDA semifinalist for the first time in his career) and Hewitt, were much fresher entering the final than their weary opponents, and buoyed as well when they cashed in their fifth game-ball of the first game (in which they led 14-12 and 2-0, set-three) on a Price tin and motored confidently through the 15-9 second, by the end of which Price’s back was clearly bothering him and he was no longer able to move unconstrained to the front left, a deficit that became even more glaring as the third game began. Shortly thereafter Price requested an injury time-out, from which he emerged five fruitless minutes later to confirm that he was unable to continue.

With Mudge, Price, Russell and Vlcek all having fallen prey in barely more than one week’s time to a combination of injuries and exhaustion, and with each of those occurrences having had an impact on the events that have been held within that fairly compressed time frame, particularly Cleveland, the current ISDA tour has become a test of attrition as much as of athleticism, with little turnaround time remaining before the February schedule resumes with a Challenger event at the Philadelphia Racquet Club in a few days followed by an important stop at Heights Casino in Brooklyn the following weekend.