ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Mathur And Badan Surge To Tompkins Invitational Title by Rob Dinerman

     Feb13^th --- In a convincing display of the athleticism and execution that has characterized their play throughout this, their first season as partners, second-seeded former Trinity College teammates and current Apawamis Club colleagues Manek Mathur and Yvain Badan cut scythe-like through a strong Challenger field at the Racquet Club Of Philadelphia to win the third annual Tompkins Invitational without losing a single game. Their three-match, nine-game path consisted of consecutive victories over first qualifiers Jamie Macaulay and Tom Harrity and then Graham Bassett and Dan Roberts (opening-round 3-0 winners over Carl Baglio and Eric Christiansen) to reach the final, where they routed top seeds James Hewitt and Greg Park in the first two games and held on in the third to complete an odd-looking 15-0, 4 and 13 tally that might well have extended to a fourth game were it not for some very capricious ball-bounces at the very end of the third.

  In so doing, Mathur and Badan consolidated their trophy-taking exploits at the Challenger tournament in Buffalo in mid-November (where they defeated Hewitt and Chris Deratnay in a four-game final), added more glitter to a season that has previously seen them reach the St. Louis final and North American Open semis and made a solid claim to having ascended to the No 4 ISDA team behind the Damien Mudge/Ben Gould, Matt Jenson/Clive Leach and John Russell/Preston Quick tandems, none of whom were eligible to compete in this weekend’s event due to the Challenger-tournament stipulation limiting participation to players not ranked in the top-eight of the ISDA standings.

   As noted, the bottom half of the eight-team main draw featured a trio of straight-game outcomes, but there was far more excitement in the top half, where Hewitt (who won the inaugural edition of this event two years ago with Willie Hosey) and Park began their run to the final by avenging a three-week-old loss in Greenwich to Tim Wyant and Josh Schwartz, who had eked out a 15-14 fifth game in that round-of-16 encounter last month when Hewitt tinned a backhand reverse-corner on the final exchange. Hewitt and Park also lost the opening game of this rematch by the same 15-14 count, but recovered to out-play their Manhattan-based foes by small but definite margins in each of the three games that followed. They then dropped another 15-14 first game in their Saturday-afternoon semi against qualifiers Trevor McGuinness and Todd Ruth, finalists in the Pittsburgh Cup Challenger tourney in October (where they had led Jonny Smith and Raj Nanda two games to one before being overtaken) and first-round 3-0 winners Friday evening over Imran Khan and Nigel Thain.

   McGuinness and Ruth then earned the second game as well, but Ruth sustained a calf injury at 14-11 that visibly constrained him during the third and fourth prior to a tape job that enhanced his mobility somewhat in a fifth game that seesawed maddeningly along all the way to 13-all. During that fifth game McGuinness, a U. S. National Doubles champion with Whitten Morris in both 2008 and 2009, was effectively roaming behind Ruth to cover the deep-right, enabling his wounded right-wall teammate to step into the ball and deliver his powerful cross-courts. But at 13-all (with an automatic no-set rule in effect, as has been true in ISDA tournaments so far throughout calendar 2011), an all-court point left the right wall open for Park to nail an untouchable forehand blast, following which Hewitt volleyed a nick-finding backhand cross-drop that surprised his two opponents, both of whom were expecting something deeper and neither of whom reacted until it was way too late. This match marked the second time in five weeks that an ostensibly-impending McGuinness victory in the late rounds of an important Philadelphia-area doubles tournament has been sabotaged by a significant calf injury to his right-wall partner; early last month, he and Morris were sailing along at 15-6, 6-2, seemingly well on their way to a fourth consecutive William White title at the Merion Cricket Club against the Khan brothers, Imran and Asad, when Morris tore his right calf so severely that he had to default on the spot and use crutches for the next several weeks.

   Buoyed by their quarterfinal vengeance-taking and semifinal comeback rally, Hewitt and Park appeared well positioned for their Sunday High Noon final --- certainly no one could have predicted the shut-out that Mathur/Badan (whose alma mater that same afternoon was defeating Princeton 6-3 at nearby Jadwin Gymnasium to finish off yet another undefeated regular season) pinned on them in the first game and the lopsided score of the second. Badan in particular was hoisting perfectly placed cross-court lobs over Hewitt’s head that were too high to be volleyed and died too close to the back wall to be properly returned, whether it was a retreating Hewitt who attempted to play it or Park circling back on his backhand.

   The weak responses that Badan’s parabolas were constantly eliciting became set-ups for himself or his lethal partner to pounce upon and punish, and it wasn’t until the third game that Park and Hewitt were able to thwart this trend by keeping the ball low enough and the pace fast enough to impinge upon the patience that had heretofore paid such handsome dividends for the Mathur/Badan pairing. Admirably in light of the thrashing they had taken during the first two games, Hewitt and Park were finally able to both generate some winners of their own and force some errors from their heretofore blemish-free opponents, though at 13-12 Mathur/Badan moved to championship-point when the former reflex-half-volleyed a ball at his feet that crawled barely over the tin and promptly died in a front-left nick.

   Park responded to this un-fortuitous turn with a forehand winner to get his team to 13-14, but on the ensuing point an over-hit Badan cross-court that it appeared would give Hewitt an open swing with plenty of room along the left wall instead hit the back wall in a way that made it run right along the left wall, an unforeseeable carom that left Hewitt understandably flat-footed and with no chance to get his racquet on the ball. In retrospect, those last two points in the Mathur/Badan column may have symbolized their entire tournament-long performance in an event in which they both out-played the rest of the field to a compelling degree AND were blessed by good fortune as well on the rare occasions when they needed it.

   The tour will resume in two weeks’ time with the 63^rd edition of the David Johnson Memorial at the fabled Heights Casino club in Brooklyn, followed by another Challenger in Philadelphia (this one at the Germantown Club) in mid-March, the Players Championship in New York and Long Island in mid-April and the biennial World Doubles in Toronto in early May.