ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Price And Gould Capture Players Championship By Rob Dinerman

April 6 --- Powered by a string of successful late-game spurts, Paul Price and Ben Gould overwhelmed top seeds Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg 15-10 15-10 18-16 Monday evening before an absolutely packed gallery at the University Club of New York, where Mudge has served as the head pro for the past eight years, in the final round of the Players Championship. Renamed by longtime Tournament Chairman Rob Deans after its first seven editions as the Creek Challenge Cup, this tournament also had a four-team WDSA pro women’s draw (won by Suzie Pierrepont and Dana Betts over top seeds Steph Hewitt and Jessica DiMauro, also by an overtime-in-the-third tally) and featured a $40,000 purse that was the largest of the season. It represented the fifth ISDA title of the current campaign for Price and Gould, who elevated their head-to-head record this season to 4-2 against their chief rivals and who have now swept the Manhattan portion of the 2008-09 ISDA schedule, having previously defended their Big Apple Open title several blocks north-west of University at the New York Athletic Club five months ago.

The pace was very high throughout the 80-minute slugfest, what with lively court conditions (abetted by the humidity of the warm and rainy evening, and the large crowd shoehorned into every crevice of the landing outside the glass back-wall) and the low ceiling of the host court and its discouraging effect on lobbing. Even vaunted shot-makers like Price and Berg, both extremely creative players who, however, can also stand their ground and blast away when the need to do so arises, had to be relatively restrained in their front-court forays, and the tin count was higher than usual as well. All three games were knotted midway through (i.e. at 8-all) and in each of the first two, Price and Gould broke away at precisely that juncture (to 12-8 in the first game and to 12-9 in the second), in both cases due to a combination of forced Berg/Mudge tins and Gould’s unrelenting and intimidating power, which enabled himself and his partner for the most part to carry the play and inexorably forge ahead.

The third game took a different course, as some nervy winners off Mudge’s bat (the last and most notable of which was a surprise drop shot from off the back wall at 12-11 that Price understandably didn’t see coming after the way Mudge had heretofore been blasting away in that type of situation) got his team to 13-11 and raised the possibility of the match being on the verge of a major turnaround, as had happened in the most recent ranking ISDA event, in late February at Heights Casino, when Mudge and Berg had overcome a two games to one deficit in defeating John Russell and Preston Quick.

But a split-decision stroke call against Berg on the right wall, followed by a Gould cross-court that was too hard-hit and widely-angled for Mudge to handle forced a best-of-nine tiebreaker, three of whose first four points landed in the Price/Gould column. Berg then came up with his best shot of the night, a forehand reverse-corner winner from off the back wall, but Price responded with a wall-hugging backhand rail that Mudge couldn’t scrape back for 4-2, set-five, triple-match-point. Oddly for a match that contained fewer than a handful of stroke calls, each of the ensuing pair of points were decided in that fashion along the left wall, the first against Price but the second against Mudge, who became trapped when he hit a loose rail and tried to cross into the middle.

Both semifinals went four games in a tournament that went almost completely according to form. Price and Gould defeated fourth seeds Matt Jenson and Clive Leach (pre-semis 3-0 winners over first Alex Langerhorst/Hamed Anvari and then, in three single-figure games, their Wilmington conquerors Steve Scharff and James Hewitt), while Mudge and Berg did the same to third seeds John Russell and Preston Quick, who had upset them four months back in the same round in Wilmington. The only one of the top-four seeds to encounter significant difficulty prior to the semis was the Russell/Quick duo, who first were forced to a fifth game by Whitten Morris (fresh from defending his U. S. National Doubles title with Trevor McGuinness just a few days earlier) and Ben Howell, and then were severely challenged by Willie Hosey and Mark Chaloner. That match stood at a game apiece with a third-game tiebreaker that went to simultaneous-game-ball, at which pivotal moment a routine-looking Quick cross-court took an odd bounce, possibly from having hit a wet spot, off the left wall (the walls at the Creek Club in Long Island, where the quarters and semis were played, WERE “sweating” a bit) that flustered Hosey and foul-tipped off his racquet.

Thus reprieved, Russell and Quick were able to break away fairly early in the fourth game against a team that had defeated them in Toronto and that has clearly established itself as the best team outside of the top four. In the remaining quarterfinals, Mudge and Berg out-played Eric Vlcek and Yvain Badan and Price and Gould did the same to Jonny Smith and Chris Walker. There remains one ranking event on the schedule, in Vancouver in two weeks, when the undulating course of the Mudge/Berg vs. Price/Gould battle for the season-end No. 1 team ranking will finally be resolved.