ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Mudge And Gould (Barely) Make It Two For Two By Winning In St. Louis by Rob Dinerman

        Oct 31^st --- Trailing 2-1, 14-11 in a late-Saturday-morning semifinal, top seeds Damien Mudge and Ben Gould saved those four match-balls-against and made that bit of brinkmanship stick by winning four subsequent games in each of which they yielded 10 points or fewer to capture the St. Louis stop on the ISDA tour. In the final later that day, Mudge and Gould (who thereby consolidated their Maryland Club Open win two weeks ago in their debut performance as partners) terminated in emphatic 15-10, 7 and 7 fashion the Cinderella run of unseeded first-time partners Manek Mathur and his former Trinity College teammate Yvain Badan, whose consecutive four-game wins over first No. 3 seeds Matt Jenson and Clive Leach and then No. 2 seeds Paul Price and Raj Nanda made them the story of the tournament, notwithstanding the severity of the final-round outcome.

   After dropping their first game against two-time 2009-10 finalists (Briggs Cup and Kellner Cup) Jenson and Leach, Mathur and Badan won the next three, with Mathur scoring repeatedly with overheads to the front-right nick, Badan backing his Apawamis Club colleague up with solid all-court play, and both of them capitalizing on some uninspired play from their heavily favored opponents, neither of whom was at the top of his game in a match that drifted away from them as Mathur and Badan came up with just enough short spurts in each game to ensure victory. They then faced Price and his Australian compatriot Nanda, quarterfinal 3-0 winners over Chris Walker and Mark Chaloner, who lost a 16-15 second game (on a slashing Mathur front-left winner on the final point) to go down two-love, but appeared to have righted themselves in taking the third. However a rash of Nanda tins enabled Mathur and Badan to race off to a prohibitive 9-1 lead in the fourth game, which they eventually closed out 15-6. This was only the second time that Badan had advanced past the quarters of a full-ranking ISDA event, preceded by his and Jonny Smith’s advance to the Kellner Cup semis last spring, while Mathur (who partnered Graham Bassett to the U. S. Under-30 Doubles title last spring) had never won an ISDA main-draw match prior to this weekend.

   The top-half semi, on the other hand, featured a foursome with many final-round appearances to their respective credits, as John Russell and Preston Quick, 14-time ISDA finalists (and 2007 U. S. National Doubles champions) in their four-plus seasons together, survived a five-game first-rounder against Michael Puertas and Nathan Dugan to earn the right to take on Mudge and Gould, who had fully controlled their quarter against James Hewitt and Greg Park. This constituted a rematch of the Baltimore final earlier in the month, in which Mudge and Gould were able to ride a 17-16 first game to a straight-set triumph. A pair of tiebreakers played a key role in the middle part of this Missouri match as well (as did some split-decision officiating), though perhaps neither game should have come down to a tiebreaker.

   After splitting a pair of 15-11 games, Mudge and Gould led 14-10 in the third and were initially awarded a stroke call in their favor when Quick got caught in the way of the ball’s path. But the two line-judges overruled the referee’s call, resulting in a let and throwing Mudge/Gould enough off stride to spark a 6-1 game-closing (to 17-15) run by Russell/Quick, who then earned that 14-11 advantage in the fourth game. On the next exchange, Russell, whose creative shot-making had been the match’s foremost theme to that point, flat-footed both of his opponents with a completely unexpected look-away forehand boast that would have been a clear match-ending winner had it not clipped the top of the tin. Thus reprieved, Mudge and Gould (who three years ago had seen a 2-0, 14-9 lead with then-partner Price dissolve into a defeat against eventual champs Walker and Leach on the same court in the same semifinal  round)blasted their way through the next three points (including a Mudge winner on the no-set call at 14-all after a stroke call was almost made against Gould in the first attempt at that 14-all point), through the 15-7 fifth game and, ultimately, through their dominant final against the starry-eyed young Trinity alums, whose tournament-long performance nevertheless has stamped them as a team which definitely bears watching as the tour moves to New York for the Big Apple Open this coming weekend.