Damien Mudge/Ben Gould: The decision that this pair of gifted Australian compatriots and heretofore fierce rivals reached this past summer to leave their respective prior partners and instead team up for the 2010-11 season may prove to be the most momentous move in the history of the ISDA in light of the firepower and athleticism that each of them possesses. Certainly there is no doubt that this pro-squash-doubles version of The Decision has made their debut performance in Baltimore this weekend the main story-line coming into this Maryland Club Open, where, ironically, four years ago Gould and his then-partner Paul Price won the first of the 22 ISDA titles they would capture, a total that also includes the ’08 Maryland Club Open, with both of those triumphs coming at the final-round expense of John Russell and Preston Quick. Mudge, who combined with Viktor Berg to earn 17 ISDA tourneys during the course of their three-year partnership (exactly the total amassed by Price/Gould over that time span), also won the first three editions (i.e. 2003-05) of this tournament with Gary Waite. There is some feeling among ISDA aficionados that the best time to defeat this awe-inspiring pairing might be when they are still getting used to each other, a theory that puts an even greater spotlight on this upcoming event, when they will be teammates for the first-ever time.
Matt Jenson/Clive Leach: Now entering their third season as partners, this pair has four final-round appearances to their mutual credit, including the two biggest tournaments on last season’s schedule, namely the Briggs Cup and the Kellner Cup, as well as the ’08 Sea Island and ’09 Boston tourneys. They barely edged out John Russell and Preston Quick for the No. 3 team ranking for 2009-10 in a season-long “shadow rivalry” in which the two teams never met, since in their alternating roles as third and fourth seeds they were always in opposite halves and, though one team or the other reached the finals of four of the eight full-ranking events, there were no tour stops last season in which BOTH of them were able to do so. Jenson and Leach were the only team to beat both of the top two teams last season (namely Paul Price/Ben Gould and Damien Mudge/Viktor Berg), doing so in straight sets (in the Briggs Cup and Kellner Cup respectively) in each case, and they had a terrific undulating series with Chris Walker and Mark Chaloner last fall/winter in which they met four times, with each team winning twice and with three of those matches going the five-game limit. Leach’s name is on the Maryland Club Open champions listing after he and Walker defeated both Mudge/Berg and Price/Gould in their victorious 2007 run, the last time that any team other than those top two has won a full-ranking ISDA tournament.
John Russell/Preston Quick: Two-time Maryland Club Open finalists (in 2006 and 2008) and winners of the 2007 U. S. National Doubles Championship at Merion, this classic doubles combination of shot-making prowess on the left and power/consistency on the right has quietly compiled a remarkable record of upset-free week-to-week achievement that causes them to almost be taken for granted. Only four times during the past three seasons have they been stopped short of the semis, and their 12-8 slate last season would have been even better had they been able to convert their 2-1, 9-2 Big Apple Open semifinal lead over Damien Mudge/Viktor Berg (who also edged Russell/Quick in a five-game North American Open final) or their 15-11 fifth-game Players Championship final-round advantage over Paul Price and Ben Gould, against whom Russell and Quick did survive an 18-15 fifth-game North American Open thriller in Greenwich. Both Russell and Quick have been extremely durable throughout their ISDA careers, though a mid-match hamstring injury noticeably affected Russell in their Kellner Cup quarters loss to Jonny Smith and Yvain Badan, and Quick at his doctor’s behest took the entire summer of 2010 off so that an elbow injury incurred last season had a chance to fully heal.
Chris Walker/Mark Chaloner: This pair of former teammates of English squads that won the World Team Championships, each a top-10 performer on the PSA pro singles circuit, became doubles partners right around Halloween and in early December they won the U. S. Pro Championship, a Challenger event in Wilmington, trailing love-two in games and 6-10 in the fourth in a 16-15 fifth-game simultaneous-championship-ball final against Jonny Smith and Yvain Badan, whom Walker/Chaloner then defeated in a rematch at the very next tour stop in Boston. The two British stars then prevailed over Matt Jenson and Clive Leach both one round later in Boston and two weeks later in a route-going Greenwich quarterfinal, a Pyrrhic victory due to the knee injury that Chaloner sustained in the last few points that caused the team to have to default their scheduled semi the next day against eventual champs Viktor Berg and Damien Mudge. In addition to those two January semifinal advances, Walker and Chaloner also reached that stage at the Players Championship with a quarterfinal win over Joe Pentland and Steve Scharff. Assuming that Chaloner emerges relatively successfully from late-summer knee surgery (more a “cleaning out” process than any invasive structural intervention), this pair remains a definite threat to any of the top four teams and an outside contender to win a full-ranking ISDA event, as Walker did with Leach when they captured the Maryland Club Open three years ago.