ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Walker/Leach Are Now Two For Two by Rob Dinerman

For the second time in seven days, Clive Leach and Chris Walker overcome a palpable deficit against the ISDA top-ranked team of Aussies Ben Gould and Paul Price and wound up winning an ISDA ranking tournament. Last week in the semifinal round of the season-opening event in St. Louis, the British stars engineered a Houdini-like escape from an 0-2, 9-14 hole, won that third game, as well as the fourth, in a tiebreaker, romped through the one-sided fifth and went on to out-play Damien Mudge and Willie Hosey three games to love in the final. This time, Walker and Leach trailed Price/Gould two games to one in the final but dominated the final pair of single-figure games to again claim the championship trophy. In accomplishing this successful comeback at the Maryland Club this past Sunday afternoon, Walker and Leach, who had played in only one event together prior to this season (in San Francisco in May ’06, where they narrowly lost a final-round tiebreaker against Gary Waite and Viktor Berg), dethroned the defending champs, consolidated their heroics one week earlier in St. Louis and emphatically announced their arrival as, at least to this early-season juncture, the best team in the 2007-08 tour. Seeded fourth (a standing that will no doubt change when the next rankings are published in a few weeks), Leach and Walker had notched consecutive straight-game pre-final wins over first Scott Butcher (Leach’s partner for all of last season) and James Hewitt and then Mudge and Viktor Berg. The latter had been forced to sit out the St. Louis tourney with a hamstring pull, and he appeared to still be favoring his right leg, a situation that Walker and Leach exploited frequently, including on simultaneous-game-ball in the third, which ended when Walker nursed a delicate cross-court drop to the front-right that the normally fleet Berg was unable to track down. In the bottom half, both the Price/Gould and John Russell/Preston Quick pairings advanced handily over Matt Jensen/Jeff Mulligan and Michael Pirnak/Mark Chaloner respectively (seven of the eight pre-semis matches, including all four quarterfinals, were completed in the three-game minimum), after which Russell and Quick won the first game of their Price/Gould semi (mostly on Russell’s remarkable sharp-shooting), leading to a pivotal second-game best-of-five overtime, which Price and Gould managed to convert. They won the third 15-7 and prevailed as well in the fourth, again in a tiebreaker, to earn their way to, but ultimately not through, the final.

Draw