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Vancouver: Price And Gould Regain No. 1 Ranking
By Rob Dinerman, Nov 10, 2007    
Squashtalk Independent News; © 2007 SquashTalk LLC

Paul Price and Ben Gould, who began the 2007-08 ISDA tour season with a pair of losses to Clive Leach and Chris Walker that caused the latter all-British pair to temporarily displace them from the No. 1 team ranking, have now reclaimed the top standing going into the month-long holiday break after tournament wins in New York, Chicago, Toronto (in a sanctioned though non-ranking event) and (this past weekend) Vancouver, where they out-played first Michael Pirnak and Mark Chaloner (for the fifth time this still-fairly-young season), then first-time semifinalists Joe Pentland and Mark Price and lastly Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg, whose unevenly bisected Sunday summit was dead-even to 1-all, 7-all, at which stage a Gould follow-through smashed into Berg’s face, causing a substantial play stoppage and necessitating 20 stitches, after which Berg was never the same and he and Mudge went down quietly during the remainder of the four-game match.

Berg, a Vancouver native who has returned there several years ago after spending most of the early-2000’s in Toronto, and Mudge entered this tourney fresh off their first-ever team triumph one week earlier in Wilmington, where Price and Gould had absorbed their first post-October loss in the semis to John Russell and Preston Quick, whose fifth-set tiebreaker win left them with insufficient energy to representatively contest the three-game final that followed. Berg and Mudge, who had led Price/Gould 11-9 in the fifth game of the early-November Big Apple Open final before dropping the final six points, followed a 3-0 quarterfinal win over Richard Thompson and Winston Cabell with a four-game semi over Leach and Willie Hosey, who was pinch-hitting for Walker while the latter fulfilled his obligations as head coach of the USA men’s team, which is currently competing in the biennial World Team Championships in Chennai, India.

Up top, while Price and Gould were reaffirming their autumn-long dominance over Pirnak and Chaloner, Pentland and Price were wisely avoiding Gary Waite and instead concentrating their attention on Waite’s partner Jeff Mulligan, who was unable to successfully repel the double-attack during this three-game quarterfinal. Pentland and had just missed reaching last year’s Vancouver semis, when he and Tyler Millard, leading Quick and Russell two games to love, had fallen short in a fourth-set tiebreaker and been out-played in the ensuing anticlimactic fifth game. This time, he and Mark Price (who had also led Russell/Quick 11-7 in the fifth game in St. Louis this fall before being overtaken in the closing lap) were able to come through, though they were then solidly out-played by Paul Price and Gould in what marked the first time that two brothers have opposed each other as late as the semifinal round of an ISDA tournament.

Having now concluded the most active autumn schedule in its eight-year history, the ISDA tour will resume in mid-January with important events in Boston and Greenwich, where in both cases Price and Gould will attempt to defend the titles they won last year.

Tournament Recap
Qtrs:
Paul Price/Ben Gould d Michael Pirnak/Mark Chaloner, 3-1
Joe Pentland/Mark Price d Gary Waite/Jeff Mulligan, 3-0
Willie Hosey/Clive Leach d James Hewitt/Tyler Millard, 3-0
Damien Mudge/Viktor Berg d Winston Cabell/Richard Thompson, 3-0
Semis:
P. Price/Gould d Pentland/M. Price, 3-0
Mudge/Berg d Hosey/Leach, 3-1
Final:
Price/Gould d Mudge/Berg, 3-1

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