ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Mudge And Gould Capture Philadelphia Pro Doubles To Complete Undefeated Autumn By Rob Dinerman

      Dec 5^th ---- In a weekend-long display of the verve, confidence and extreme efficiency that has fueled their play from the moment they joined forces for the first time this past October, top seeds Damien Mudge and Ben Gould rolled unstoppably through the draw at the inaugural Philadelphia Pro Doubles tournament, capping off their three-match march to the title with a convincing 15-5 15-9 6-15 15-12 final-round win over Paul Price and Clive Leach this afternoon before a highly appreciative gallery. Mudge and Gould, who in addition to their prepossessing weaponry already display remarkable teamwork, especially given the brevity of their partnership, thereby concluded an autumn 2010 ISDA campaign that saw them win all five full-ranking events on the schedule, compiling a mark of 15-0 in the process, with the first four of those titles (in Baltimore, St. Louis, New York and Vancouver) coming against four different teams and the theoretical maximum eight different players, namely John Russell/Preston Quick, Manek Mathur/Yvain Badan, Matt Jenson/Leach and Price/Viktor Berg respectively.

    Mudge and Gould began their march to the cup with their sixth consecutive straight-set win in their quarterfinal against qualifiers Mathur and Badan, though each game against this decidedly up-and-coming pair of recent Trinity College teammates was close both statistically and territorially. Mudge and Gould then dropped the first game to Quick (who hit a forehand reverse three-wall winner at game-ball) and Russell (who shot the lights out in that opening stanza) before asserting themselves in the remainder of their 10-15 15-10 15-6 15-8 tally. Russell and Quick, first-round winners over Pittsburgh Challenger champions Jonny Smith and Raj Nanda and now in their tour-leading fifth season as partners, were rare opponents two weeks ago in Toronto in the final of the Cambridge Club Doubles (a “special event” with a round-robin format in which the Tournament Committee pairs the players up) which Russell and Berg won in five over Quick and Jenson.

   The bottom half of the draw, as has been true throughout this Mudge/Gould-dominated fall, featured some wild swings of momentum and contained most of the tourney’s excitement and drama. In one quarterfinal, fourth seeds James Hewitt and Greg Park, leading qualifiers Greg McArthur and Dan Roberts two games to love, lost 11 of the first 12 points of the third game, were out-played as well in the fourth and fell behind 8-6 in the fifth before embarking on a 9-0 match-saving final surge; in the other, the reunited duo of Willie Hosey and Mark Chaloner, winners two years ago over both Russell/Quick and (twice) Jenson/Leach, led Leach and Price 1-0, 14-11, only to lose that game by one point and then see a 4-0 third-game edge surrender to an astonishing 15-0 Price/Leach run from which Hosey/Chaloner were never able to recover in a match whose odd stat line was 16-17 17-16 15-4 15-6.

    The ensuing Price/Leach vs. Hewitt/Price semi also began with a pair of evenly divided tiebreaker games, with a Leach cross-court that took an unexpected angle off the wall past Hewitt accounting for the first game and a Hewitt backhand reverse-corner winner against Price sealing the second. Play continued evenly to 5-all in the third game as well, at which stage the ball broke and when a new one was introduced, Leach and Price successfully elevated the pace and Price, who had heretofore been played to a standstill by Hewitt along the left wall, started going cross-court more, bringing Leach (who scored frequently on straight drops from mid-court as well as front-court) into the action and keying his team’s run to a 17-15 16-17 15-6 15-4 victory.

   This was the first full-ranking ISDA event in suburban Philadelphia in the nearly four years since the U. S. National Doubles, won by Quick and Russell, was part of the pro-tour schedule in March 2007 at the Merion Cricket Club. Neither Mudge (who with partner Gary Waite suffered the only 3-0 first-round loss in their seven years together, at the hands of Michael Pirnak and Tyler Millard) nor Gould (who with partner Hosey let multiple-match-balls get away in their simultaneous-match-ball semifinal loss to Leach and Scott Butcher) had fared well in that prior foray. But their performance this weekend consigned that memory to irrelevance as they swiftly assumed a two games to love lead over Leach and Price, who briefly turned the match around in the third game and kept the fourth close, only to fall barely short by that 15-12 margin when Gould abruptly terminated the final exchange with a forehand three-wall that dead-nicked in front of Price.

   The tournament, which marked the first-ever appearance of the Philadelphia Country Club on the ISDA calendar, was a major success overall (a tribute to Nigel Thain and Imran Khan, pros at the host venue), as witness the enthusiastic gallery throughout the weekend, and hopefully this event will become a permanent fixture on the schedule. With the eight-stop fall portion of the 2010-11 season (five full-ranking, two Challenger, plus the Cambridge Club Doubles) now completed, the tour will take a holiday-season break before resuming five weeks hence with a busy January ledger that includes sequential-weekend stops in Wilmington, Boston and Greenwich.