ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Raj Nanda And Mark Price Win St. Louis Challenger Event By Rob Dinerman

Nov 16 --- In a solid tournament-long display of superior execution, the newly formed Westchester-based Australian pairing of No. 3 seeds Raj Nanda and Mark Price knifed through the $10,000 St. Louis Challenger tourney this past weekend without losing a single game in their three-match path to the title. They rose superior, sequentially, first to Dan Roberts and Greg McArthur, and then tournament chairman Mike Puertas and Jamie Crombie (first-round straight-set victors over second seeds Carl Baglio and Alex Langerhorst) to reach the Saturday-evening final, where they defeated Philadelphia torch-bearers Tom Harrity and Imran Khan by a score of 16-13 15-10 15-13.

Harrity and Khan, who were quarterfinalists in the ’06 ISDA U. S. Pro Championships in Wilmington, had followed a highly competitive four-game opening-round win over Rob Dinerman and his dynamic young Toronto-based partner Will Mariani with a surprising rallying semifinal victory from two-love down against No. 1 seeds James Hewitt, winner with Willie Hosey of the Philadelphia Racquet Club Challenger event last winter, and Greg Park. The debuting Hewitt/Park tandem had completely controlled the 15-6, 15-10 initial pair of games and even in losing a 15-13 third (when Park tinned a forehand three-wall after his team had saved four straight game-balls-against) they did not appear to be in any danger.

It was not until Harrity and Khan almost silently came away with the first seven points of the fourth game that it became clear how substantially the momentum had turned, and by then it was too late for the top seeds to reverse the flow as they yielded the final two single-digit games. Harrity and Khan, especially the former, were patiently lobbing Hewitt into the deep-left portion of the court, then looking to shoot when an opening arose. By the end, Hewitt was struggling with his swing while a clearly out-of-sorts Park was not reacting well to the salvos that came his way and unable to impose the firepower that had brought himself and his usual partner Tim Porter to the quarters of both the Briggs Cup and the Big Apple Open last month.

Before an appreciative but reserved set of onlookers in the gallery, Harrity and Khan started off 8-5 up in the final, but once that opening frame slipped away when they were blanked in a best-of-five tiebreaker, Nanda and Price were able to build on that advantage through the second game as well. They always appeared on the verge of running off with the third game but every time they were prevented from doing so when one of them hit the tin or when one of their opponents, especially the sharp-shooting Khan, came up with a big shot to keep them in the game. At 14-12, Nanda tinned a daring drop shot and on the ensuing 14-13 point the ball broke, forcing a brief hiatus while the new one was warmed up.

The Philadelphians had been winning that type of close game throughout their prior rounds --- the first game of their Mariani/Dinerman quarterfinal, a one-pointer, had been decided by a nick-finding Khan smashed shallow backhand cross-court, and, as noted, their narrow escape in the third game of their Hewitt/Park semi had fueled their eventual comeback win in that round as well --- but any thoughts of a replay of those pre-final heroics were promptly snuffed out when play resumed, as Nanda, seeing that both Khan and Harrity were bracing to defend their respective walls as he moved in for an open forehand from deep in the court, instead nailed a drive through the open middle of the court, which cleanly passed in between his two adversaries and died at the back wall to conclude the tournament in this distinctive calling-card fashion.

Neither Nanda nor Price had played in any of the three 2008-09 Challenger tourneys, and it will be interesting to see if their can duplicate their St. Louis results in three weeks in the early-December Wilmington Challenger, where they are again seeded third, this time behind the top-seeded British pairing of Chaloner and Chris Walker and the second seeds, mid-2000’s Trinity stars Jonny Smith and Yvain Badan.