ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Price And Gould Capture Kellner Cup By Rob Dinerman

     April 27^th --- The ISDA 2009-10 tour came to a resounding conclusion this past weekend in mid-town Manhattan, where the $50,000 biennial Kellner Cup, hosted by the University, Union and Racquet & Tennis Clubs, was won by second seeds Paul Price and Ben Gould, who defeated Clive Leach (a Kellner Cup champion seven years ago by virtue of his and Blair Horler’s 15-13 fifth-game final-round win over three-time defending champs Gary Waite and Damien Mudge) and Matt Jenson 15-7 15-10 17-16 Monday-evening final in which Leach and Jenson staved off an ISDA-record six consecutive championship-balls-against and actually earned a triple-game-point of their own before grudgingly ceding the final three points.

   Every round of the tournament had at least one truly dramatic match --- Josh Schwartz and Tim Wyant rallied from way behind to overtake Graham Bassett and Dylan Patterson in a fifth-set tiebreaker in the final qualifying round, following which Whitten Morris and James Stout pulled off a tight four-game round-of-16 upset win over Chris Walker and Mark Chaloner, Yvain Badan and Jonny Smith did the same in a 15-13 fourth-game quarterfinal win at the expense of third seeds John Russell and Preston Quick, preceding the eyebrow-raising 15-12, 13 and 9 tally by which Leach and Jenson ousted defending Kellner Cup champs Mudge and an error-prone Viktor Berg Sunday afternoon in the semifinal.

   Leach and Jenson, after first soundly beating Hamed Anvari and Willie Hosey in their quarter, played that semi with such focus, concentration and a relentless application of their game plan (which was based on lobbing Berg deep, taking him out of his comfort zone and forcing him into racquet errors, which he committed by the bushel-full, including nine in the anti-climactic third game, four of them on serve-returns) that they were in complete control throughout against the ISDA’s top ranked duo, which had been undefeated all season in pre-final play prior to being dismantled on this occasion.

   While these various disorderly goings-on were occurring elsewhere in the draw, Price and Gould, coming off the Players Championship they had won just one week earlier, were serenely sailing through the debris, terminating the Morris/Stout and Badan/Smith runs in each case in four games. They were at the top of their formidable games through the first two games and to 14-8 (from 7-all) in the third --- but when a somewhat accidental and putatively too-late-to-matter “excuse-me” Leach drop-shot serve-return winner was followed by a tinned Price reverse-corner and then a quartet of consecutive Jenson winners (on a cross-court drop nick, a backhand rail pass down the left wall, a nervy and tin-defying backhand straight-drop and then a reverse-corner that Price got his racquet on but couldn’t return), the score, incredibly, stood at 14-all. Gould and Price then unexpectedly chose the best-of-five tiebreaker rather than a no-set call that would have given them another match-ball, after which Price tinned a backhand cross-drop and a suddenly on-fire Jenson caught a front-left dead-nick on a shoulder-high volley to give his team a 2-0, set-three advantage and a seeming stranglehold on a game that just eight points earlier had appeared hopelessly lost.

   But Price finally broke the scoring skein by lacing a backhand reverse-corner winner, then pulled off perhaps the best shot of the entire match, volleying a Leach cross-court into the near left-wall for a three-wall nick winner at an almost impossible angle. No one knew what to expect on the ensuing simultaneous-game-ball point, which ended a bit oddly after an innocuous-appearing Price lob over Leach’s head hit the back wall at an angle that caused it to stay so glued as it ran along the right wall that the latter’s attempt to scrape it back into play resulted in a foul-tip that fluttered only a few feet forward before plummeting to the floor well short of the front wall. The outcome extends to 34 the number of consecutive ISDA full-ranking tournaments won by either Price/Gould or Mudge/Berg dating back to October 2007, with the count during that span standing at 17 titles apiece for these two top teams, whose head-to-head record for this just-completed campaign is also dead even at two wins each.