ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Written by Rob Dinerman
Date: November 05/08

     As they did two years ago in what proved to be the first steps in an eventual takeover of the No. 1 ISDA ranking that Damien Mudge and Gary Waite had held so proudly for so long, Paul Price and his Australian compatriot Ben Gould have won the first two ranking tournaments on the 2008-09 tour, the Maryland Club Open and Big Apple Open, to take an early lead in what figures to be a season-long battle for this year’s top spot. In the process, they have defeated each of the other three teams in the top-four aristocracy that went a combined 60-1 against the rest of the field last season at least once, while demonstrating that they have regained the knack of winning both their five-game matches (as in their Baltimore semi against Clive Leach and Matt Jenson) and their tiebreakers (as in the second game of their New York final vs. Mudge and Viktor Berg, who displaced Price/Gould as the No. 1 team last season and who led that game 12-8) that had been so much a part of their 2006-07 success before seemingly abandoning them in 2007-08.

    Though the top four seeds have now gone eight for eight in advancing to the semifinals so far, there are already indications that this will be a much more competitive tour up and down the line than was the case last season. In Baltimore, for the first time in ISDA history, all three of the pre-final main-draw rounds saw half of their matches go the five-game maximum, and in New York all six combined quarter- and semifinal matches went four games, a marked contrast from the situation last season, when, as noted by that 60-1 tally, the top four teams were so dominant that most of the tournaments had all four quarterfinals go three games and out. Already this young season, Leach and his new partner Jenson had consecutive five-game matches, something that no top-four seed experienced at any point last year, out-lasting Joe Pentland and Mark Price in a Maryland Club Open quarterfinal before falling just short one round later against Paul Price and Gould.

    Pentland would be involved in another route-goer two weeks later at the New York Athletic Club as well when he and Steve Scharff trailed Addison West and Whitten Morris (who by that juncture had already saved a combined five match-games-against in their pair of comeback qualifying-round victories over first Yasser Kamel/Eric Christiansen and then Bradley Ball/Raj Nanda) 11-7 in the fifth game before conjuring up a match-saving 8-1 run to 15-12. This reversal represented a second straight near-miss for Morris, who with partner Michael Ferreira had held a fourth-game match-ball opportunity in a Baltimore round-of-16 match-up with Eric Vlcek and Yvain Badan before Ferreira tinned a backhand reverse-corner and the reprieved Vlcek/Badan duo took the ensuing fifth game 15-12.

  The latter pairing have had some exciting October matches of their own --- they annexed the season-opening “Challenger” event (a new ISDA concept for tournaments below the $20,000 full-ranking minimum level, limited to players not ranked in the top 10) in Pittsburgh, surviving first-set tiebreakers in each of their three matches (against Shane Coleman/Gavin Jones, Michael Pirnak/Chris Deratnay and finally James Hewitt/Mark Chaloner); then, as noted, staged that match-ball-saving rally at the expense of Ferreira and Morris in Baltimore, where they proceeded to push eventual finalists Preston Quick and John Russell to five games; and stood at 2-0, 13-all in New York, on the cusp of what would have been a noteworthy win over Willie Hosey and Chaloner, who however swept the best-of-nine tiebreaker and rolled through the subsequent pair of single-digit games.

   Buoyed by the strong fifth game they had played in squelching the Vlcek/Badan bid to upset them, Quick and Russell then posted their first-ever win (after a quintet of fruitless attempts last season) over Berg and Mudge, who had posted so compelling a post-Thanksgiving record (reaching all 10 ISDA finals, winning eight of them) in earning their No. 1 end-of-season ranking in 2007-08, but who (even in reaching the Big Apple final, avenging in the process their Baltimore loss to Russell/Quick in a 3-1 semi) have looked a bit out of synch and out of sorts this autumn. Mudge, who made so remarkably successful a switch to the left wall last season after his seven record-shattering years on the right as Waite’s partner, committed an uncharacteristic number of errors in Baltimore, while Berg appeared to have strained an arm muscle early on in the New York loss to Price/Gould, which began just minutes after Berg had expended a tremendous amount of energy in an (ultimately unsuccessful) bid to win the pro-am final. A year ago, they would have been unlikely to have let that 12-8 second-game lead slip away, and even more unlikely to have committed the pair of consecutive tins (on a Berg forehand re-drop bit and a Mudge backhand cross-court) that sealed their fate in that game’s best-of-five tiebreaker. It will be interesting to see if this pair of champions can regain their form as the fall portion of the schedule (which includes stops in Toronto, St. Louis and Wilmington before the Christmas holiday-season month-long break) moves along, or if Price and Gould can maintain the intimidating level of excellence they have demonstrated to this point.