Mudge And Gould Surge To Big Apple Open Crown
By Rob Dinerman, for DailySquashReport.com
Dateline December 6th, 2011 --- Buoyed by the manner in which they had come through in the clutch in a riveting Sunday-afternoon semifinal, top-seeded defending champions Damien Mudge and Ben Gould arm-fought their way through the end stages of a close first game and never looked back, defeating second seeds Matt Jenson and Clive Leach 15-13, 4 and 10 Monday evening in the final round of the ninth annual Big Apple Open, held as always at the New York Athletic Club in mid-town Manhattan. This 75-minute rematch of the 2010 edition of this tournament was a fine match in its own right, featuring a plethora of kaleidoscopic angles and plenty of pace, though it didn’t quite equal the consecutive-match drama of the semis, in which Leach and Jenson rallied from two-one down with a pair of 15-7 close-out games against qualifiers (and quarterfinal winners over Chris Walker and Mark Chaloner) Imran Khan and Raj Nanda, while from a game apiece against St. Louis finalists Manek Mathur and Yvain Badan, Mudge and Gould had a third-game lead of 14-9 and fourth-game margins of 12-4 and 14-11 both dissolve into a pair of 14-all simultaneous-game-balls but managed to win each of those decisive points on a pair of front-court winners off Mudge’s racquet.
Gould, whose power game seems especially well suited to the lively front wall of the NYAC’s doubles court, has now won this tournament six of the past seven years, with three different partners, having taken this title with Preston Quick in 2005, with Paul Price throughout the three-year period from 2006-08 and now the past two years with Mudge, who previously had won this event with Gary Waite in 2004 and with Viktor Berg in 2009. With last night’s triumph, Mudge and Gould have now been victorious in all 14 ISDA ranking tourneys that have occurred since their partnership began in October 2010, going 44-0 during that time frame.
As noted, the hardest of last night’s trio of games was the first, which Leach and Jenson began by keeping the ball high and deep, a clearly pre-planned tactic designed to keep their opponents as far back as possible and perhaps to induce impatience. Even in falling behind 13-9, they stuck with their approach, and when they rallied to 13-14, with Jenson hitting two tin-defying winners and Gould stymied by a Leach rail that clung to the right wall, the game appeared to be up for grabs. But on the ensuing point Leach, who to that juncture had been using the height of the court brilliantly with his parabolic lobs and clever angles, over-hit a backhand whirly-bird which soared well above the side wall boundary line and doomed his team’s comeback bid.
Disappointed by the outcome of a first game throughout which they had expended a tremendous amount of effort and output, only in the end to have come up short, however barely, Leach and Jenson seemed to go a little bit negative in the second game, especially in a mid-game Mudge/Gould eight-point run from 4-3 to 11-3 during which Gould (whose remarkable energy level belied the strenuous four-game loss that he and his amateur partner Kipp Sylvester had sustained at the hands of John Russell and Paul Marvin in the pro-am final that directly preceded the pro final) went off on a shot-making spree that saw him mash three overhead volley winners directly into the front-left nick, knife a forehand reverse-corner from behind the red line and wrong-foot Leach (who was expecting something short) by instead nailing a rail that arrowed down the right wall.
Gould’s heroics sealed the second game, but Leach and Jenson regrouped for the third, fighting their way to 6-all (with one of their points coming on a spectacular Leach reflex-volley of a Gould smash, and another when Jenson steered a daring cross-drop into the front-right nick) and staying in reach almost to the end before surrendering the final three points, the last of which came on a Leach drop-shot from the back wall that caught the top of the tin. Ultimately the relentless Mudge/Gould attack, and the even more relentless DEFENSIVE pressure that their ubiquity creates, leaving so few “safe” areas where the ball can be hit and making their opponents wonder where winners can be found, led to just enough Jenson/Leach errors and gave Mudge/Gould more than enough winning openings, to account for the fairly clear-cut final outcome. The Jenson/Leach, Mathur/Badan and other contending pairings (including Jonny Smith/Preston Quick, who gave Mudge and Gould plenty of trouble in a 15-13, 13 and 12 quarterfinal, and Russell/Greg Park, who lost to Jenson/Leach in four games in the quarters) will not have to wait long to make another run at The Champs, since the biennial Briggs Cup, the most lucrative stop of the ISDA circuit, is looming just a few days hence, with a Friday round-of-16 and a final next Monday night.
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