ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Jan 25^th --- Faced with a one-game deficit and later a crossroads simultaneous-game-point, top seeds Damien Mudge and Ben Gould responded to this pair of exigencies like the champions they are with a 7-15 15-10 15-14 15-11 victory this past Monday evening over first-time partners Matt Jenson and Yvain Badan at the Greenwich Country Club in the final round of the 28^th North American Open. In so doing, Mudge and Gould retained the title they had won last year, consolidated their Boston triumph a week earlier, recorded their 16^thtournament title in their season and a half together and re-established the supremacy they had temporarily misplaced when they suffered the only loss of their partnership to Badan and Manek Mathur last month in the semifinals of the Briggs Cup just two MetroNorth stops south at the Apawamis Club in Rye.

It was Jenson’s second straight appearance in the finals of this prestigious tournament (he and Clive Leach had progressed to that point a year ago) and the second consecutive time as well that both teams that qualified into the main draw of this event then proceeded to win their main-draw round-of-16 match as well, a decided rarity, especially given how strong the qualifying rounds are in an event of this magnitude, which usually leaves the survivors too depleted to legitimately contest their higher-ranked first-round opponents. Last year it was the Josh Schwartz/Tim Wyant and Imran Khan/Greg McArthur tandems who earned their way into the quarterfinals with wins over James Hewitt/Greg Park (15-14 in the fifth) and Chris Walker/Mark Chaloner respectively. This past weekend, qualifiers Bernardo Samper and Mark Price out-played Briggs Cup semifinalists Park and John Russell while Steve Scharff and Phil Barker, who had defeated the top-seeded qualifier-draw team of Will Mariani and Ian Power en route to earning a main-draw slot, then defeated McArthur and Dan Roberts before falling in a competitive four-game quarterfinal to Mathur and Leach.

The latter pairing, Boston finalists one week earlier in their first event as teammates, then faced Jenson and Badan, quarterfinal winners over Khan and Raj Nanda, who in their opening match had won over Paul Price (who with Gould had won this tourney in 2007 and 2009) and five-time North American Open Doubles finalist Willie Hosey. Jenson and Badan shot the lights out in grabbing the first two single-digit games (15-6, 15-9), then had a complete one-game collapse in a 15-3 third, leading to a fourth game in which, for the only time in the match, BOTH teams played to their high-level standard through 28 evenly-divided points, at which 14-all juncture Badan laced a ball down the middle that forced Mathur, his Briggs Cup-winning partner just 42 days earlier, to commit a racquet error ushered Jenson/Badan into the final.

Waiting for them there were Mudge and Gould, who had brusquely ended the Samper/Price run in the quarters before prevailing in a similar three in the semis over Preston Quick and Jonny Smith, quarterfinal victors (reversing the result when these same two teams had met eight days earlier in Boston) over Walker and a tin-prone Chaloner. Mudge and Gould, understandably expecting the kind of slugfest in which they so excel, were completely nonplussed when their opponents instead employed the novel strategy of constantly lobbing Gould, denying him his favored mid-court position and instead forcing him to retreat to the rear while effectively freezing Mudge out of the action. This approach both frustrated Gould and his increasingly antsy partner and frequently opened up the court for Jenson and Badan to shoot, which they did to telling effect in convincingly making off with the first game, staying virtually even (9-10) through most of the second before yielding a 5-1 closing Mudge/Gould run, and, most importantly, playing their vaunted foes to a dead standstill all the way to 14-all in the pivotal third.

As noted, Jenson and Badan had won the match-defining 14-all point one round earlier against Mathur/Leach, and a duplication of this accomplishment in this final round’s third game would have left them superbly positioned to win this coveted title. But a lengthy all-court exchange ended when, on a ball hit down the middle, Mudge was able to guide a forehand straight-drop shot winner into the front-right nick, preceding a fourth game in which his team, though never able to break away from their tenacious opponents, nursed small leads (7-4, 9-8, 12-10) all the way to 13-11, at which juncture a leg-cramping Gould lofted a cross-court lob which could have been volleyed but instead was allowed to bounce at too extreme an angle into the back-left corner for Jenson to excavate it back into play. Having thereby earned this crucial point that made the score 14-11 instead of 13-12, Gould smashed a forehand three-wall into the front-left nick to conclude this epic match two full hours after it began and clinch  a second consecutive North American Open Double title (Gould’s fourth, Mudge’s 11th, with 13 straight final-round appearances) for the pair of Australian superstars.