ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Mudge And Gould Debut By Earning Maryland Club Open Title By Rob Dinerman

October 18 --- Convincingly overcoming a minor misstep out of the gate, first-time partners and heretofore arch-rivals Damien Mudge and Ben Gould roared through the draw of the first full-ranking tournament of the 2010-11 ISDA tour season, the $20,000 Maryland Club Open. After narrowly dropping an opening-game tiebreaker in their quarterfinal against ’09 Wilmington Challenger winners Chris Walker and Mark Chaloner (who then took a 7-4 lead in the second), Mudge and his Australian compatriot Gould proceeded to win nine straight games, culminating their three-match path to the championship with a 17-16 15-8 15-11 final-round victory over third seeds and two-time (in 2006 and 2008) Maryland Club Open finalists John Russell and Preston Quick. It was the fourth time that Mudge had won this event (preceded by his run from 2003-05 with Gary Waite, the inaugural editions of the tournament) and the third for Gould, who had successfully teamed up with Paul Price in ’06 and ’08 before this site took a one-year hiatus last season in deference to Baltimore’s hosting of the U. S. National Doubles championships this past March.

The high-paced Mudge/Gould vs. Walker/Chaloner slugfest, by far the highest-quality of the four quarterfinals, contrasted with the tone of the subsequent top-half semi, in which fourth seeds James Hewitt and Greg Park tried (with some success in getting to 8-all in each of the first two games) to slow Mudge and Gould down by lobbing them to the back-court and shooting when the opportunity presented itself. But Mudge and Gould were able to pull off quick spurts to draw ahead late in both of those games and dominated the close-out third. Hewitt and Park had advanced with a solid four-game win over the Boston-based pair of Greg McArthur and Dan Roberts, who in the last round of qualifying earlier in the day had trailed Philly Country torch-bearers Imran Khan and Nigel Thain 13-6 (and 14-12) in the fifth before finally coming through 17-16 when Thain tinned a drive on simultaneous-match-ball.

In the bottom half, Quick and Russell split the first two games of their opener against recently-ensconced Pittsburgh Cup Challenger winners Jonny Smith and Raj Nanda before asserting themselves in the last two games. They then faced second seeds Matt Jenson and Clive Leach (3-0 first-round winners over qualifiers Eric Christiansen and Graham Bassett), with whom Russell and Quick had conducted a year-long “shadow rivalry” throughout the 2009-10 season, during which these two tandems never met head-to-head, by virtue of always being in opposite halves of the draw and never BOTH winning their respective semis. Jenson and Leach had been Kellner Cup finalists last spring, while Russell and Quick had been ousted in the quarters, and Quick had been forced to rest his ailing elbow during most of the intervening summer.

He and Russell fell behind 18-17, 17-16 (with both games ending on last-point winners by Jenson, the first when his three-wall took a wildly erratic bounce past Quick and the second on a tight reverse-corner) but, with Russell/Quick up 13-12 in the third, a backpedaling Jenson (who was trying to clear for a Leach lob that wound up out of court for 14-12) got his feet locked up with Russell’s, hyper-extending Jenson’s right knee as he fell to the floor and visibly limiting his mobility from that point onward. This unexpected and match-changing development put an even greater urgency on the end-portion of that third game, and when Quick and Russell escaped with a 15-13 tally, they were essentially home free, winning the fourth game more comfortably and moving out to 3-1 in the fifth as well. By this time, Leach was having to cover much of the entire court as Jenson was becoming increasingly and worryingly constrained, to the point that at this juncture early in the fifth, not wanting to exacerbate Jenson’s injury with a busy fall tournament slate looming, the team accepted the inevitable and defaulted, an anticlimactic ending to the first of what figures to be many exciting battles between these closely matched duos.

The Sunday-afternoon final was witnessed by a packed gallery whose number included most of the participants in a concomitant six-man Legends Of Squash singles tourney that was won by Peter Nicol in a four-game final over John White. Several of the singles players, including the England-based trio of Nicol, David Evans and Simon Parke, lamented afterwards that their flight back to London was scheduled to depart too soon after the doubles final concluded to permit them to try hardball doubles squash themselves, as they clearly would eagerly have done had time constraints not prevented it.

Quick and Russell played so well and so hard during the seesawing first game against Mudge/Gould that they HAD to have that game in order to realistically have a chance to win the match as a whole. They saved several game-balls-against to get to two-all, set-three, but on the ensuing simultaneous-game-ball, a long rally marked by almost universal blasting finally left Mudge with an open forehand front-left drop shot with Russell and Quick both too deep in the court to have any possibility of running it down. Reprieved by this fortunate but fully deserved turn of events, Mudge and Gould galloped off to a 13-5 advantage in the second and never relinquished control during the close-out third. Having now emphatically lived up to everyone’s expectations in their opening salvo of the season, Mudge and Gould have a week off to reload for the consecutive-weeks St. Louis and Big Apple Open stops that take place starting on Halloween weekend.