(updated 25-jan-10 22:03 ) 

Waters Prevails in Harrow Greenwich WISPA Final [WISPA DRAW/RESULTS]

Undaunted by the determined fifth-game rally of an inspired opponent that was seeking its second upset win in as many days, Viktor Berg rose to the fore with a display of shot-making that repulsed the threat and keyed his and partner Damien Mudge’s 15-10 17-15 12-15 13-15 15-8 victory over John Russell and Preston Quick Sunday afternoon at the Greenwich Country Club in the final round of the 26th annual North American Open Doubles championship.

It was the second such title in the past three years for the Mudge/Berg tandem, which also triumphed in ’08 before being dethroned by Paul Price and Ben Gould in the final a year ago. Mudge, who won this championship with Gary Waite for six straight years in the early- and mid-2000’s before Price and Gould finally wrested it away from them in ’07, has therefore now accumulated a total of eight North American Open crowns and advanced to the finals of each of the past 10 editions of this prestigious tournament. The Mudge/Berg win extends to 30 the number of consecutive ISDA full-ranking tournaments that have been won by either Mudge/Berg or Price/Gould dating back to October ’07, when Chris Walker and Clive Leach defeated both of those teams at the Maryland Club Open in downtown Baltimore.

The two finalists were coming off vastly differing semifinal experiences, with Berg and Mudge getting a walkover due to the severity of the late-match knee injury that Mark Chaloner had suffered in his and partner Walker’s five-game quarterfinal win over Matt Jenson and Clive Leach. By vast contrast, Russell and Quick had a thrilling but exhausting come-from-behind 18-15 fifth-game win over Price and Gould (who led 2-0 in the best-of-nine tiebreaker before surrendering the final five points), and the carryover effects of this epic struggle (abetted by the fact that Russell had also played a pro-am match Sunday prior to the final) may have played a role in the opening stages of the final, though they did lead the second game 14-12 before losing it in overtime.

CLUTCH RUSSELL REVERSE CORNER
Mudge and Berg were up 12-10 in the third, just three points from the title, but a 5-0 game-ending Russell/Quick run (culminating in a tin-defying Russell backhand reverse-corner winner, the same shot he had similarly hit at 14-13 in the pivotal third game of their semifinal the day before) preceded a 13-8 fourth-game advantage that nearly disappeared when Mudge and Berg closed to 13-14. But Quick then was able to conjure up a perfectly-placed forehand straight-drop winner to finish off that game and set up a decisive fifth, only the second time in the past eight years that a North American Open final had been extended to a fifth game.

Mudge had been on the short end of the lone exception, when in 2007 at the Field Club of Greenwich he and Waite had similarly led Price/Gould two games to love and dropped a three-point-margin third game and a 15-13 fourth before losing the fifth 15-11. Determined to not have a repeat of that outcome, he and Berg focused much of their effort on making Russell expend as much energy as possible by moving him up and back and keeping him enough of the defensive to prevent him from utilizing the shot-making skills that had been so impressive throughout the entire tournament. They jumped out to early leads of 4-0 and 7-4 but when Russell and Quick crept back to 7-8, anything seemed possible in the looming end-game.

BERG SEALS THE OUTCOME
It was at this crossroads juncture that Berg, as noted, sealed the outcome by hitting most of the winners in a 5-0 run to 13-8. His weekend began in near-disastrous fashion when he missed his flight from Vancouver on Thursday, but by late Sunday afternoon he and Mudge were all smiles as they hoisted one of the most coveted trophies in all of squash.

WATERS GETS THIRD TITLE
They were not the only top seed to fulfill that demanding pre-tournament expectation in Greenwich this past weekend: Alison Waters, WISPA No. 6, attained the third tour title of her career when she won the Harrow Greenwich Squash Open without the loss of a single game by out-playing second seed Omneya Abdel Kawy 11-8 12-10 11-7 in the final.

Waters had advanced to that stage at the expense, sequentially, of Aisling Blake, Samantha Teran and Vanessa Atkinson, while Kawy had trailed her Egyptian compatriot (and quarterfinal winner over third seed Laura Massaro) Raneem El-Weleily 8-7 in the fifth game before a 4-0 match-closing run brought her to her second consecutive Greenwich Open final.

Last year she had some match-balls against Natalie Grainger, who eventually eked out a 13-11 win and was prevented by a heel injury from participating in this year’s event, in which a fully-deserving Waters clearly was the best player, as she proved by wending her way through that potentially match-changing second-set tiebreaker and then finishing matters off in a well-played but somewhat anticlimactic third and final game.

Harrow Greenwich Open WISPA Singles: [SEE FULL DRAW/RESULTS]
Final: [1] Alison Waters (ENG) d [2] Omneya Abdel Kawy (EGY) , 11-8 12-10 11-7.

Doubles Finals Recap;
Men’s North American Open Doubles:
Damien Mudge/Viktor Berg d John Russell/Preston Quick, 15-10 17-15 12-15 13-15 15-8.