First-Time Partners Manek Mathur And Ben Gould Capture Tavern Club Invitational Crown In Dramatic Finish by Rob Dinerman Dateline April 17th
--- Immobilized by an eleventh-hour onset of debilitating leg cramps
that threatened to sabotage what had been shaping up as a storybook
return to SDA competition, Ben Gould nevertheless conjured up an
emphatic forehand smash into the front-left nick on match-ball that
delivered a 15-8, 9-15, 15-9, 12-15, 15-11 victory for himself and his
first-time partner Manek Mathur over Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg
before a packed and riveted gallery at the 11th annual Tavern Club
Invitational in Cleveland this past Saturday evening. This tournament
in general, and the final’s closing three points in particular (which
Mathur/Gould swept, with Gould hitting two of the three winners, after
Mudge/Berg had crept back to 11-12 after trailing by five points
earlier in the game), constituted a memorable calling-card close-out to
the full-ranking portion of the 2015-16 SDA season, which has only a
Challenger event in New York this coming weekend still remaining on the
schedule.
For Gould, a six-time defending
champion in this event (which he won in 2010 with Paul Price and from
2011-15 with Mudge) whose appearance was especially surprising for
coming just 124 days after he had announced his retirement from the
tour in mid-December, the outcome represented a welcome mirror image of
what had happened at the final SDA full-ranking tournament a year ago,
at the biennial World Doubles in suburban Chicago. There, in a tableau
eerily similar to this past weekend in Ohio, he and Mudge rallied from
4-9 to 11-12 against John Russell and a severely-cramping Clive Leach,
only to then be stymied when Leach, hopping on one foot to the ball,
hit a spectacular reverse-corner winner, following which Gould tinned a
drive and Leach hit another winner to seal a 15-11 tally for his team.
The Tavern Club Invitational has a unique character --- ranging from
the excellence of the arena itself (the doubles court is possibly the
best of any on the North American doubles circuit) to the vocal and
passionate involvement of the membership to the singular organizational
effort put forth by the club’s Tournament Chairman and14-year head
professional Ian Sly --- that frequently enhances the dynamics of the
matches, and this year was no exception. Two of the four
Thursday-evening round-of-16 matches were extended to a fifth game, in
each case with the eventual winners having to rally from two games to
one down. Qualifiers and first-time partners James Bamber and Bobby
Burns saved a fourth-game match-ball against them en route to
out-lasting Freddie Reid Jr. and Justin Todd, while Carl Baglio and
Travis Judson, semifinalists in this tourney two years ago, escaped
with a 15-12 fifth-game win over Aaron Luque and Ian Power. Baglio and
Judson then battled fiercely against Mudge and Berg, who, however,
persevered at the end-stage of each game, as did Russell (a last-minute
substitute for an injured Greg Park) and Jonny Smith in their match
with Bamber and Burns.
In the draw’s top half,
Mathur and Gould debuted Friday night with a straight-set quarterfinal
score over Will Mariani and Dylan Patterson, and Jacques Swanepoel and
his former Trinity College teammate Shaun Johnstone barely averted a
fifth game against Dan Roberts and Greg McArthur when at 14-all in the
fourth a ferocious and lengthy series of exchanges ended when Roberts
bashed a cross-court that sailed just over the boundary line of the
back wall. The caliber of the Mudge/Berg vs. Russell/Smith and the
Mathur/Gould vs. Johnstone/Swanepoel semis mid-day Saturday was very
high, with the winning team in each case asserting itself , setting the
stage for a final whose intensity level, abetted by the historical
backdrop of Mudge and Gould opposing each other for the first time
after their five and a half seasons of pro-doubles domination, the cozy
confines of the venue and raucous engagement of an enraptured gallery
and the event’s positioning as the last full-ranking tour stop on the
schedule, all added up to what well may have been one of the greatest
matches in the history of the doubles squash.
Virtually every point even in the single-figure games was fervently
contested, with each player leaving a major hand-print on the
undulating action. Mathur and Gould were intent on holding front-court
position and inflicting relentless pace to open up the court, while
Mudge and Berg in the games they won did a great job of slowing the
pace down and creating up-and-back movement for their opponents,
especially Gould, who in his return after a four-month hiatus was
having to deal with both this event’s compressed playing schedule
(three matches in 24 hours) and a level of tightness in his calves and
hamstring muscles, especially when he moved backwards to field lobs
after he had previously been maneuvered to the front of the court, that
steadily increased as the fifth game moved along and as Mudge and Berg
relentlessly cut into the sizable mid-game deficit that had confronted
them.
At 11-10, Mathur hit a winner for 12-10
but Gould came up lame and holding his right calf, leading to a brief
and tension-building stoppage. When play resumed, Mathur made several
forays to the front-right to keep the point going (just as Russell had
done to rescue Leach a year ago in Chicago) but Berg hit a shallow
forehand rail that died before Gould could scoop it up. At that
juncture, having surged from 4-9 and 8-11 to 11-12, Berg and Mudge
seemed to be well positioned to run the game out in light of how
constrained Gould had become. By this time the largest crowd ever to
watch a squash match in Cleveland, had occupied every inch of available
space, both behind the glass back wall and upstairs in the gallery, and
were roaring after every torrid exchange.
Amazingly, it was Gould and Mathur who came up with the winners at this
match-defining moment, with Gould nailing a reverse three-wall that
nicked in front of Berg, following which Mathur, at 28 by far the
youngest player of the foursome (Mudge and Gould will both mark their
40th birthday before calendar 2016 comes to an end and Berg turns 39 in
October), slashed a backhand rail down the right wall to get his team
to match-ball, which Gould, as noted, converted with his forehand blast
directly into the front-left nick, leading to a series of embraces
among all four players and a lengthy standing ovation. Everyone present
that night exited the building fully aware that they had witnessed a
display of skills, athleticism and competitive courage that made for
something that was truly special.
