ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Written by Rob Dinerman
Date: November 30/11

Nov 25^th – When Mark Chaloner and Paul Price soundly defeated Damien Mudge and Willie Hosey, three games to love, this past Monday evening in the final round of the 38^thannual Cambridge Club Doubles in downtown Toronto, they completed a remarkable run for this prestigious pro doubles tournament in which 12 different players, the theoretical maximum, have contested the past three finals (i.e. 2009, 2010 and 2011). Two years ago, Ben Gould and Michael Pirnak emerged victorious in their final against Chris Walker and Clive Leach, while last season it was John Russell and Viktor Berg who overcame an 8-3 fifth-game deficit and overtook Preston Quick and Matt Jenson. Chaloner and Price were teaming up for the first time, as is also true of their immediate predecessors in the winners circle, Russell and Berg, and the Pirnak/Gould title-winning duo had been partners on only one prior occasion, namely the Heights Casino tournament nine months earlier in February ’09, where they lost in their very first round.

Five of those 12 players (Gould, Leach, Price, Hosey and Mudge) have participated in each of these last three Cambridge Club tourneys --- indeed, all five have been fixtures in this event throughout the past half-dozen years --- and most of the others have played in two of the three. There have been only 19 total entrants over the past three years, and for as many as 12 players of those 19 to have reached a Cambridge Club Doubles final during such a compressed time span, yet for none of them to have done so MORE than once, is both an amazing phenomenon and inarguably a tribute to the Tournament Committee of the host club for their decision to assign the team pairings (rather than have them determined by the players themselves), which perhaps constitutes an instructive example for other pro doubles sites to follow.

This latter set of points is especially true when compared to the rest of the ISDA full-ranking tour events – if one factors out the Cambridge Club and the Challenger events (in which players ranked in the top eight are not allowed to play), there have been FORTY-SEVEN consecutive tournaments dating back to October 2007 in which either Mudge and/or Gould was a member of the championship team. From November 2007 through the end of the 2009-10 campaign, there were 34 such events, which were evenly split at 17 apiece between the Price/Gould and Mudge/Berg tandems. Then, after Mudge and his Australian compatriot Gould decided to join forces during the summer of 2010, they promptly went 12 for 12 last season and notched the St. Louis title last month.

Certainly they have had to wriggle out of a few predicaments in compiling that mark, as when Russell/Quick led them 2-1, 14-11 in an October 2010 St. Louis semifinal, or when Russell and his fellow Englishman Leach took a two games to one lead over Mudge/Gould in the World Doubles final this past May. but to this point, on the eve of a crucial pair of consecutive-weekend New York metropolitan-area early-December tournaments, namely the Big Apple Open in Manhattan followed by the biennial Briggs Cup, whose $100,000 purse more than doubles that of any other ISDA tour stop, the Aussie gunslingers have always come up with the big shot whenever they have had to --- OTHER than in the Cambridge Club Doubles, the one event where over the past three years no fewer than10 other players have hoisted the Jim Bentley Cup as often as Mudge and Gould have.