Chaloner And Price Dominate Cambridge Club Doubles Final
By Rob Dinerman, for DailySquashReport.com
Dateline November 23rd – Following through on the momentum they had established one day earlier with their five-game Pools win over Ben Gould and Chris Walker, Mark Chaloner and Paul Price jumped out early and never looked back Monday night in a dominant 15-7, 10 and 11 final-round victory over 2000 Cambridge Club champs Damien Mudge and Willie Hosey. In so doing, early-2000’s PSA top-10’s Chaloner and Price maximized their first-ever foray as partners, never relinquishing statistical and territorial control of the action and thoroughly earning the right to hoist the permanent Jim Bentley Cup emblematic of their triumph in the 38th annual edition of this prestigious championship.
Price, making his first appearance this season in ISDA competition, displayed his usual sharp-shooting prowess, but this win should mostly be credited to Chaloner, 10 years removed from his prior Cambridge Club Doubles crown (with Gary Waite) and just one week removed from his wedding ceremony. Chaloner’s powerful blasts down the right wall were so effective early that Hosey and Mudge switched walls between the first game and the second, with Mudge moving to the right, where he had been positioned when he and Waite dominated the tour throughout the half-dozen-year period from 1999-2006. But this tactical adjustment did little to stop the Price/Chaloner momentum, as Chaloner continued to attack, his cross-courts possessing the width needed to chase Hosey back and cough up responses that Price consistently put away with front-court winners. Mudge was unable to exert his usual severe influence on the action as the second and then the third game both inexorably went in the direction of the two former PSA stars.
Beating Clive Leach and John Russell (which Mudge/Hosey did in a draining five games Sunday afternoon), who came close to ruining Mudge and Ben Gould’s undefeated 2010-11 season when they took a two games to one lead in the finals of the World Doubles last spring, was a formidable accomplishment, especially on the part of the now-50-year-old Hosey, and it may have at least subtly influenced the course of the final. Ultimately, the truly compelling part of this tournament was the pair of sequential thrilling five-game clashes for the right to play in the final, which itself turned out to be something of an anticlimax, given the degree to which Chaloner and Price maintained command from start to finish.
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