ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Russell and Berg Capture Cambridge Club Doubles By Rob Dinerman

        Nov 28^th – Trailing 6-2 in the fifth game of the final round, their 2-0, 8-3 lead a distant memory and a deflating defeat looming ever more inevitable with each passing point, first-time partners John Russell and Viktor Berg erupted on an out-of-the-blue nine-point surge to clinch a 15-9 15-10 12-15 8-15 15-12 victory over Matt Jenson and Preston Quick and thereby win the 37^th annual Cambridge Club Doubles championship this past Monday night before a packed gallery in downtown Toronto. Jenson and Quick, finalists in their one prior foray as partners in Cleveland in February 2008, seemed to have permanently wrested control of the action during their extended 33-14 mid-match surge, only to then fall victim to a few unforced errors and some inspired shot-making by Russell, who thereby recorded his second career ISDA title (preceded by the U. S. National Doubles crown that he and Quick won in 2007), while denying Jenson what would have been his first.

   Both tandems lived dangerously in their respective pre-final three-team round-robin brackets. Russell and Berg were extended to a fifth game in their match against Paul Price and Greg Park, after which they faced 2004 Big Apple Open champs Willie Hosey and Clive Leach, who had earlier defeated Price/Park in straight sets. Though the ensuing match lasted only three games, all were extremely close and competitive, and Russell seemed noticeably fatigued by the end of the third game, though he was the one who came up with the end-game winners that prevented the match from going to a fourth game.

   In the other pool, Jenson and Quick, after winning three-love over defending 2009 Cambridge Club champions Michael Pirnak and Ben Gould, were then out-lasted in five by Gary Waite and Damien Mudge, who won this event in ’99 en route to compiling the greatest tournaments-won total (75) in the history of North American professional hardball squash during their seven years (from 1999 through 2006) of supremacy. When Pirnak and Gould then defeated Waite/Mudge in four, leaving all three teams with a 1-1 mark, it created the need to resort to a “tiebreaker” from which Jenson and Quick emerged by virtue of having won the most total games (five) of any of the three teams.

   As noted, the final had three highly distinct parts to it. A rejuvenated Russell, the best player in the tournament throughout the weekend, was on fire with his front-court arsenal through the first two and a half games, only to then have his hot streak end just as Quick and especially Jenson started finding the range with their own offensive thrusts and Berg, who has played rarely this autumn and is basically taking a hiatus from the tour this season, tried a few impetuous and high-risk shots for which his team paid a price. But, after Jenson/Quick erased that five-point third-game deficit to rescue that game, handily win the fourth and seemingly take a commanding lead early in the fifth, the match took its second and defining U-turn with that 9-0 Russell/Berg run from which Jenson and Quick were not able to fully recover. The eleventh-hour Russell/Berg heroics capped off a hectic pre-Thanksgiving weekend for the ISDA tour (which also had a Challenger event just down the road in Buffalo, which was won by Manek Mathur and Yvain Badan over James Hewitt and Chris Deratnay in the final), leading into a full-ranking tourney at the Philadelphia Country Club this coming weekend, after which the tour will take a month-long break for the holidays.