ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Walker/Leach Capture Season Opener By Rob Dinerman

Given up for dead after falling behind two-love, 14-9, Chris Walker and Clive Leach staged an amazing comeback (against the No. 1 seed, no less) and thereby got both their new partnership and the 2007-08 ISDA professional doubles tour off to a rousing start. They ran off eight straight points against top seeds Paul Price and Ben Gould to salvage that game, took the equalizing fourth game in this semifinal encounter in another 17-14 tiebreaker, ran off to a 5-0 lead en route to 15-8 in the fifth, then punctuated this eleventh-hour rallying win by storming through a straight-set final several hours later on the host Racquet Club Of St. Louis glass-back-wall exhibition court against Damien Mudge and Willie Hosey to grab the first title of the new season. It was Leach’s first ISDA tournament victory since he and Hosey earned the 2004 Big Apple Open trophy three and a half years ago over the recently-retired Gary Waite and Mudge, who this past weekend became the sixth partner (preceded by Jamie Bentley, Viktor Berg, Michael Pirnak, Leach and Blair Horler) with whom Hosey has reached an ISDA final --- an all-time record in the nearly eight year since the formation of the Association in January 2000. The weekend’s action also signaled the tour’s growing depth and parity; not only did Walker and Leach have to rally from that prohibitive deficit to stay alive in their semifinal win, but the Mudge/Hosey semifinal win required them to win both the third and fourth games of their 3-1 semi by a single point over John Russell and Preston Quick, who themselves saw a 14-9 fourth-game quarterfinal advantage get away against Joe Pentland and Mark Price, who then proceeded to a 12-7 lead in the fifth before bowing to a desperate but successful Russell/Quick power surge that garnered them the last eight uninterrupted points. James Hewitt and Ayman Kerim won their round of 16 match against Tim Porter and Andrew Cordova, then forced second- and third-game tiebreaker sessions in their subsequent quarterfinal against Mudge and Hosey. The latter first-time-ever pairing thus went 4-0 in their pair of pre-final matches, but that string ended when Leach carved a drop-shot winner into the front-right nick to conclude the final’s 16-15 first game, after which Leach and Walker raced through the final pair of single-figure games to finish off the weekend in decisive fashion.

Draw