Winter/Spring ISDA Tour Schedule Features New Partnerships And Intrigue
By Rob Dinerman, for DailySquashReport.com
Dateline January 9th, 2012 --- If form holds true, Clive Leach and Matt Jenson, partners for the past three and a half years and finalists in both ISDA tournaments just last month, will be opposing each other in the semifinals when the 2012 portion of the current ISDA tour kicks off at the University Club of Boston later this week. In the wake of the losses they suffered in the Big Apple Open and Briggs Cup finals (to Damien Mudge/Ben Gould and Manek Mathur/Yvain Badan respectively) in early December, Leach and Jenson amicably decided to end a partnership that had brought them to a total of 10 ISDA finals and the No. 2 team ranking. In Boston, where Leach and Jenson were runners-up to Mudge and Gould in 2011, Jenson will be paired with Paul Price (with whom he reached the quarterfinals of the World Doubles last May in their debut appearance as partners before losing to Mark Chaloner and Jonny Smith) as the third seeds and, with Badan no longer able to commit to an active ISDA schedule due to his responsibilities in his new position at the Country Club of New Canaan, Leach will be playing with his new partner Mathur and occupying the No. 2 seeded slot. They will be facing a strong challenge in their quarterfinal from Greg Park and John Russell (Briggs Cup semifinalists by virtue of their quarters win over Chris Walker and Chaloner) if Russell and Park can get by their round-of-16 match against whichever team emerges from a qualifying-draw bracket that includes Briggs Cup quarterfinalists Shaun Johnstone and Eric Christiansen.
The most salient question surrounding the tour in the wake of the disorderly December doings will be how Mudge and Gould, 46-0 and 14 for 14 in tournaments played/won prior to letting a two games to love lead and a third-game match-ball get away in their Briggs Cup semi against Mathur/Badan, will respond to their five-week-old first-ever defeat as partners in the important Boston/Greenwich January schedule and beyond. The 2011 Briggs Cup marked the first ISDA full-ranking final without either Mudge or Gould in it since the March 2007 U. S. National Doubles at the Merion Cricket Club in suburban Philadelphia, 52 tournaments and nearly five years ago, when Russell and Preston Quick defeated Leach and Scott Butcher; had the Briggs Cup final-round teams remained intact, the stage would have been cleanly set for the 2012 portion of the schedule, with each of the top three teams having reached two of the three autumn 2011 ranking-tournament finals, with each event having a different team (Walker/Chaloner in St. Louis, Khan/Nanda in New York and Russell/Park in Rye) filling the fourth semifinal slot, and with suddenly white-hot rivalries simmering throughout the Christmas/New Year’s recess to be renewed as soon as play resumed in New England.
Those six teams, along with the Smith/Quick duo, which FOR SURE is too good to be denied a spot in the semis for much longer (as they will have the opportunity to prove in Boston, where they will oppose the suddenly vulnerable-appearing fourth-seeded Walker/Chaloner duo in the quarters if they can first get past an opening-round assignment against Josh Schwartz and Hamed Anvari), would have made for a formidable septet, and one can only imagine how motivated Mudge and Gould would have been to redeem their setback the next time they would have faced Mathur and Badan.
Instead, Mudge and Gould now will not have the chance to exact that revenge, and the partner shuffle in the top tier ---including, of course, Jenson and the partner(s) he takes on, beginning with Price in Boston and Badan in Greenwich --- will create a whole brave new ISDA world this coming winter and spring. Chaloner (who with Price won the invitational mid-November Cambridge Club tourney) and Walker, two-time finalists last season but ousted prematurely in the quarterfinals of both December events, are in danger of losing their top-four-seeded status if they don’t have a strong January showing, a scenario which, along with the top-tier midseason realignments and, most compellingly, the Mudge/Gould mission of regaining the supremacy that they temporarily misplaced at the Apawamis Club, should make for a captivating second half of the 2011-12 ISDA tour.
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