ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Park And Khan Rally And Then Roll At Germantown By Rob Dinerman

      Mar16 --- Trailing two games to love Saturday evening against a former PSA No. 1 and an ’09 ISDA Challenger runner-up, second seeds Greg Park and Imran Khan proceeded to run off six consecutive games (the first five by definitive margins) and thereby capture the eighth annual Graham Cup, hosted as always by the Germantown Cricket Club in suburban Philadelphia, where (as he noted in his speech during the trophy presentation) Park had first learned squash as a youngster and where for the second straight year a $10,000 ISDA Challenger tournament headlined the schedule.

   It was the third time in as many attempts and with as many different partners this season that Khan has won a Challenger semifinal by surmounting a two-game deficit (previously in St. Louis in November with Tom Harrity and at the Philadelphia Racquet Club four weeks ago with Nigel Thain, both times at the expense of Park and James Hewitt), but, whereas those prior pair of comebacks had led to final-round losses (to Mark Price/Raj Nanda and Price/Steve Scharff respectively), this time Khan and Park made their rally against John White and Shane Coleman stick by surging to a 2-0, 11-7 lead in the final over top seeds Hewitt and Price and managing to hold on for a 15-7 15-11 16-15 victory.

  The Challenger series (for players not ranked in the top eight) is now complete for the 2009-10 schedule, with Price the only two-time winner, and with three of the four events in that category having ended on simultaneous-game-ball in the match-ending game: Raj Nanda nailed a forehand winner down the middle past Harrity and Khan to prevent a fourth game in St. Louis, and the simultaneous-match-ball that concluded the early-December Wilmington final between former British PSA top-sevens Mark Chaloner and Chris Walker and early-2000’s Trinity teammates Jonny Smith and Yvain Badan was decided on a go-for-broke Walker forehand reverse-corner winner in front of a diving Smith. Some of the full-ranking ISDA finals have been airtight as well --- just last month in Brooklyn, Damien Mudge hit an audacious forehand roll-corner winner from the back wall at 14-13 in the fifth to give himself and partner Viktor Berg a win (on their sixth consecutive match-ball) over Paul Price and Ben Gould --- which graphically points up how competitive the tour has become at all levels.

   Hewitt and Price roared unimpeded into this Germantown final with a pair of 3-0 wins over first Andrew Slater and Dylan Patterson and then Carl Baglio and Eric Christiansen, while in the bottom half (all eight of whose participants are denizens of the host city) White and Coleman defeated Yale captain Todd Ruth and current (with Whitten Morris) U. S. National Doubles champion Trevor McGuinness, also in three, for the right to face Park and Khan. The latter pairing had earned a straight-set though highly competitive quarterfinal against qualifiers Todd Harrity, who was less than a week removed from culminating his outstanding freshman year at Princeton by advancing all the way to the final of the Intercollegiate Individual tourney, and his uncle Tom, a finalist last month in the U. S. Hardball Nationals.

  The bottom-half semifinal, the only one of the seven main-draw matches to extend past the third game, saw Coleman (a finalist with Gavin Jones at the Racquet Club Challenger last season, losing to Hewitt and Willie Hosey) and White slug their way through the regulation first game and a one-point second, after which Khan and Park wisely slowed the pace a bit and began moving Coleman up and back to a degree that mitigated the latter’s stroking sharpness and caused his partner to become somewhat impatient in his shot selection. These changes, complemented by Khan’s increasingly successful front-court forays (especially his backhand reverse-corner) and Park’s effective hard-serving tactic and penetrating lobs and cross-courts, caused a dramatic turnaround on the scoreboard, as the eventual champs dominated the final three games to the tune of 15-9, 7 and 8.

  They would continue this momentum through most of the Sunday-afternoon final, as Hewitt (coming off a successful title defense of the Canadian Mixed Doubles with wife Steph one week earlier) and Price were for the most part unable to dictate the play to anywhere near the extent expected of them. Price in particular, who had scored so many winners in that victorious final in Missouri four months back, was not taking advantage of the shot-making openings that presented themselves, while Park and Khan were both sharp and opportunistic in moving through the single-figure first game (which they closed out on a 10-2 run from 5-all) and the slightly more even but still convincing second. At 7-11 in the third, Hewitt and Price finally reacted to the growing urgency of their predicament with a stepped-up pace that forced a best-of-five tiebreaker, whose first four points were evenly divided.

   How the top seeds might have subsequently fared had they been able to rescue that game was rendered a moot point when at 2-all, set-three, Park, with Price stuck on his left hip in mid-court, nailed a forehand rail down the right wall that passed his opponent and died in back for a clean winner to give himself and Khan this championship. The tour will now have several open weeks before resuming with a pair of important mid-April New York tournaments on consecutive weekends, namely the $40,000 Players Championship followed by the biennial $50,000 Kellner Cup.