ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Mudge and Gould Sweep The Field In Vancouver To Go Four For Four By Rob Dinerman

        Nov15 --- Building on their intimidating Big Apple Open final-round victory over Matt Jenson and Clive Leach five days earlier, top seeds Damien Mudge and Ben Gould powered through the Vancouver draw without dropping a single game to win their fourth ISDA full-ranking title in as many events so far this 2010-11 season. By posting their sequential victories over first qualifiers Michael Leckie and Justin Todd, then Jonny Smith and Raj Nanda and final-ly Paul Price and Viktor Berg, Mudge and Gould extended their consecutive-games-won streak to 16 and sent yet another ringing message of how difficult they will be to defeat as the tour moves into the midseason part of the schedule.

   Smith and Nanda, champions in a Challenger event in Pittsburgh early last month and Big Apple Open semifinalists by virtue of their run through the qualifiers and subsequent quarterfinal win over Price and his brother Mark, emerged from a surprisingly competitive opening-round Vancouver four-game win over Canadians Will Mariani and Ian Power, only to be peremptorily ousted by Mudge and Gould in three single-figure games. The balancing bottom-half semi, between a pair of first-time tandems --- namely James Hewitt/Leach and Price/Berg --- was clearly the match of the tournament, with each of the first three games being decided by two points or less after both teams had straight-gamed their respective first-round opponents, New Yorkers Michael Fensterstock/Jon Urbana and Los Angelinos J. P Rothie/Stefan Castelyn.

   After a front-court winner by Price at 14-13 gave his team the first game, Leach and Hewitt survived a simultaneous-game ball in the second on an error by Berg at 2-all in a best-of-five tiebreaker. The third game also was resolved in a best-of-five overtime session, and after an opening pair of evenly divided points, a questionable no-let call against Leach (when his feet got tangled with Berg’s as he reached for a Price cross-court that MIGHT have passed him anyway, but might not have) was followed by a lob serve that took an unforeseeable bounce directly along the left wall after hitting the back. Hewitt dove for the ball in a frantic attempt to steer it back into play, but it wound up hitting the tin and ending the game. The fourth was competitive as well, but Price and Berg earned just enough of a cushion to come away with their 15-13 16-17 17-15 15-11 ticket to the final, which was played several hours later on Saturday evening.

  This match-up could have had a significant edge to it, representing as it did a clash between former members of partnerships of several years duration until just this past spring. Indeed, the primary story-line of the ISDA tour for the past three years prior to this current campaign had been the almost preternaturally airtight rivalry for supremacy between the Mudge/Berg and Price/Gould pairings, which for that matter had opposed each other the most recent time that there had been a tour stop in Vancouver in April 2009 (3-0 for Mudge/Berg). From late October 2007 through the end of last season, there had been 34 ISDA full-ranking tournaments, ALL of which had been won by one or the other of these teams, with the total standing at 17 each, with the 9-8 edge that Price and Gould had earned in their head-to-head meetings (all in finals) over that span counterbalanced by the fact that Mudge and Berg had finished two of those three seasons as the No. 1-ranked team.

   Berg had decided to take a sabbatical from the ISDA tour this season, and had only played the Vancouver event because that is the city where he currently resides; indeed, he and companion Morgan Van Breda, who has been wheelchair-bound since suffering a severe spinal-cord injury in 2003, will be embarking on a 3,300-kilometer, seven-week bike-riding trip across India this coming winter, with Van Breda using a specially-designed hand-cycle, to promote a not-for-profit spinal-cord injury recovery foundation that she is establishing (more information is available at their web site, www.theableproject.com). But it was known that the midsummer phone conversation during which Gould had informed Price that their four-year partnership had ended and that he would be playing with Mudge this season had taken on a distinctly heated tone.

   Notwithstanding this potentially provocative backdrop, the final was a match of high quality and good manners, the course of which could have been substantially affected had Price and Berg (after dropping the 15-12 first game) have come away with the second-set tiebreaker. But when Mudge and Gould made off with that overtime session, they were home free to a close-out 15-8 third game and yet another visit to the winners circle. They will presumably be assigned to different partners during the Cambridge Club Doubles in Toronto this coming weekend (which utilizes a round-robin format and “matches” team partners), then will reunite in Philadelphia on the first weekend of December before the tour has its annual month-long holiday-season break.