ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Late Price/Gould Rally Earns Them Players Championship Title By Rob Dinerman

     April 21^st --- After yielding a seven-point run that turned an 11-6 advantage into a 13-11 deficit in the deciding game of the final round of the $40,000 Players Championship, Paul Price and Ben Gould managed to run off the final four points and emerge with an immensely hard-earned and ferociously-contested 12-15 15-12 13-15 15-13 15-13 victory over John Russell (whose brilliant match-long effort was tarnished by the tins he hit on both of the best-of-three tiebreaker points) and Preston Quick, who for the second season in a row (previously the ’09 Heights Casino event vs. Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg) led 13-12 in a game the winning of which would have netted them one of the ISDA tour’s most coveted titles, only to then wind up on the short end of a 15-13 score.

   The dynamics of the tournament were severely affected by the withdrawal for various reasons of a half-dozen top-30 players in the days preceding the event, most notably the aforementioned top-seeded and No. 1 ranked team of Berg (undisclosed cause) and Mudge, who was still feeling the lingering effects of a concussion incurred the prior week when he was struck by a racquet follow-through in a practice game. Their pre-tournament probable quarterfinal opponents, Wilmington Challenger champs Chris Walker and Mark Chaloner, instead opposed Joe Pentland and Steve Scharff at that stage of the draw, and defeated them to advance to the semis, where they became the third consecutive four-game victim of Russell and Quick, who had earlier dispatched both the John Musto/Rob Dinerman and Willie Hosey/Hamed Anvari duos. The latter pairing had been pushed in their opening round against Dylan Patterson and Graham Bassett to the only fifth game of the weekend prior to the final.

   The draw’s bottom half saw both the eventual champs and the Matt Jenson/Clive Leach tandems advance without dropping a game to a Sunday semi in which Jenson and Leach won the opening game and had opportunities in both the second (leading 11-8) and third, in which they stood at double-game-ball in a best-of-five tiebreaker, whereupon a mis-hit “framed” winner off a lunging Gould’s bat was followed by a Price hard-serve that Jenson opted not to volley, a choice he would regret when it dead-nicked at the back wall behind him. Buoyed by this narrow escape, Price and Gould jumped out early in the fourth and were never threatened thereafter.

   This knack for successfully living dangerously served them well in the Monday-night final at the University Club of New York, whose score-line accurately conveys how close the match, especially the last three games, truly was. At its virtually exact mid-point, 1-all, 9-all, Price’s back buckled, causing a play stoppage following which Russell and Quick hit two winners after calling no-set at 13-all, thereby giving themselves a two games to one lead that was cancelled out by Price and Gould managing to convert their fourth game-ball when at 14-13 Price nicked a forehand cross-court that rolled out in the front-left before Russell could react. After taking fifth-game leads of 7-1 and later 11-6, Price and Gould, as noted, lost the next seven points, mostly due to Quick’s forehand cross-court power, which elicited a series of both forced and unforced errors from Price. When at 12-11 Russell then nicked a backhand crosscourt-drop in front of a boxed-out Gould, his team seemed poised to notch the first tournament win for any team other than Price/Gould and Mudge/Berg (who are slated to play in this weekend’s Kellner Cup) dating back to October 2007.

  But a courageous Price straight-drop serve-return winner, followed by a backhand that Gould lashed to perfect depth down the left wall, led to another no-set call by Russell and Quick, which got away from them in swift and anticlimactic fashion when Russell’s attempt to blast his serve-return past Price instead rang noisily off the tin. Early on in the ensuing exchange, he tinned a reverse-corner from off the back wall (exactly the same shot he had scored on to seal the third game), allowing Price and Gould, who had seemed so beleaguered less than two minutes earlier, to breath a sigh of relief at having survived a two-hour marathon which had brought them to the very brink of defeat.