Top Two Seeds Mathur/Arnold (Barely) And Stout/Badan Advance To Big Apple Open Doubles Final Dateline October 21, 2021
– Trailing 11-6 in the fifth game, their early-tournament dominance and
early-match advantage having been reduced to a distant memory, top
seeds and first-time partners Manek Mathur and Scott Arnold somehow
conjured up a fast-and-furious 9-2 match-ending charge that gave them,
however barely, a 15-13, 14-15, 15-7, 12-15, 15-13 victory over Zac
Alexander and Greg McArthur this afternoon in the semifinal round of
the Big Apple Open, sponsored by JLL and held as always at the New York
Athletic Club in midtown Manhattan. Mathur and Arnold will face second
seeds and defending Big Apple Open champions James Stout and Yvain
Badan, four-game semis winners over Michael Ferreira and James Bamber,
in the final on Monday evening.
All four seeded teams with varying degrees of difficulty made it
through their Saturday-afternoon quarterfinal matches, with
Mathur/Arnold sweeping to a straight-set victory over qualifiers Chris
Binnie and Jamie Haycocks, Alexander/McArthur and Stout/Badan both
winning in four over Ryan Cuskelly/Cameron Pilley (both
recently-retired longtime PSA singles performers) and Graham
Bassett/Clive Leach respectively, and Ferreira and Bamber barely edging
Adam Bews and Eric Bedell, 15-12 in the fifth, after falling behind two
games to one. Mathur and Arnold (a last-minute replacement for Chris
Callis after the latter incurred a sprained ankle just a few days
before the tournament began) had looked so overpowering in their
opening-round match that they were viewed as strong favorites to wind
up in the winner’s circle.
They may yet realize that expectation, but, as noted, they were
brought right to the brink in today’s match, which lasted nearly two
hours and four of whose five games were decided by extended
eleventh-hour runs. Alexander and McArthur saw an 11-5 first-game
advantage dissolve into a 15-13 loss, then rallied from 6-12 to 15-14
in the second and split the first 14 points of the third game, after
which there was a brief play stoppage in order to towel off the floor
and allow McArthur, who had sustained a cut on one of his fingers, to
leave the court and get a band-aid. When play resumed at 1-1, 7-7, the
Mathur/Arnold pair ran off the last eight points of that game, only to
falter in the late stages of the fourth game and fall seemingly
insurmountably far behind in the fifth. To that juncture, Alexander and
McArthur, who had shown extraordinary discipline throughout the match
in sticking to their game plan of lobbing Arnold to force him deep and
then attacking the front-right, were getting solid gains from this
approach, while both Arnold, looking a bit mentally fatigued under the
brunt of the pressure directed his way, and an over-anxious Mathur were
contributing tins to their opponents’ total.
It is therefore to the enduring credit of this besieged
pair, who were clearly looking down the gun barrel of an impending
defeat against elite opponents who were playing at the top of their
games and had by that juncture commandeered all the momentum, that they
were nevertheless came up with their best production of the day right
when it was needed the most. They picked up the already-torrid pace to
an even greater level, covering for each other whenever they had been
moved out of position and successfully going for a series of nervy
winners that actually had them leading 13-12 (a 7-1 spurt) before
Alexander hit a winner to knot the score at 13-all. So much of the
Alexander/McArthur offense had been directed at Arnold that it seemed
inevitable that he would decide the match, one way or another, and he
rose to the occasion with a pair of point-winning volleys that
dead-rolled out of the front-left nick, the first on a blasted
cross-court and the second on a three-wall off an Alexander
cross-court, the only time in the entire match in which he had tried
this shot under those circumstances and an emphatic exclamation point
on a game that ended a full 38 minutes after it began.
Although the bottom-half semi had fewer pyrotechnics and a
somewhat less dramatic evolution, it too was characterized by
remarkable athleticism, several striking in-match adjustments and an
extremely high level of execution. Stout and Badan, final-round winners
over Alexander and Robin Clarke the last time this tournament was held
in October 2019, split the opening pair of games, then ran off with the
15-4 third game and pulled away in the closing stretch of the 15-10
fourth. The versatile Stout, who was the World Rackets singles champion
for more than a decade and is a past winner of the U. S. Open Court
Tennis title as well, was able to fire off a mixture of winners
(including one on a tight reverse-corner on match-ball), while Badan
was nearly error-free throughout the final two games and exerted
constant pressure with his volleying skills and pace. Badan is actually
a two-time defending Big Apple Open champion, having also won the 2018
edition with Bernardo Samper when the final between them and
Mathur/Callis had to be stopped midway into the second game when Mathur
ruptured his left Achilles tendon.
