World Champions reign supreme at British Open Doubles

Riviere and Chisholm inflict historic defeat on Howell and Smart

Camden Riviere and Tim Chisholm have won their fifth British Open Doubles Championship as a pair, defeating Nick Howell and Leon Smart in a historic drubbing. In front of a crowd that included HRH Prince Edward, Duke of Edinbrugh, the Americans played like royalty hardly missing a ball or shot as they impressed the audience with excellent stroke-making.

Riviere and Chisholm were at their world beating best throughout the first set, dominating in every part of the court including their serve, return, forcing, retrieving and corner play. Their play was faultless and relentless, as nothing Howell and Smart could do really seemed to trouble them. The World Champions dropped just eight points in the first set, even though they spent a large portion of the set at the recievers end.

Howell and Smart opted to switch receivers at the start of the second set, with Howell taking Chisholm’s serve instead of Howell’s. It did little to blunt the American’s momentum, as they continued their excellent run. The challengers had a few game points in the fourth game of the set but on every occasion the Champions raised their game and fended it off, taking the second set to love and becoming only the second pair this century to bagel the first two sets of a major final, following John Lumley and Kieran Booth against Nick Howell and Bret Richardson in the 2022 Australian Open. Howell in particular was feeling the scoreboard pressure missing big shots on key points as their searched for their first game, while Smart was clutching at his shoulder on several occasions.

Smart and Howell won their first game at the start of the third set, as Riviere tried to chase down a drop shot on a long chase. They could muster two more but the game was always with the World Champions, finishing the match winning over double the number of points than their opponents.

“We did not have a very good night the other night [in the semi final] so we wanted to remind everybody that we are the best players in the world on the doubles court, so we put it to them tonight in that regards,” said Chisholm.

“It’s playing within ourselves, not trying to do to too much and not trying to cover too much for each other and trusting in our teamwork and believing in each other, so we can hit confident shots and force extra errors or different things around the court,” said Riviere, “I feel like when we do that we play our absolute best and we end up making better decisions, hit the right shots and don’t make errors and we put our opponents under an incredible amount of pressure that leads to more errors and more points for us.

“I think Leon was struggling a bit physically tonight. It’s been a long week, they had that 6/5 in fifth in the doubles semis, so I think Nicky especially came in knowning they needed to be on point, both of them, to bring it to us. You could feel early on that they weren’t necessairly there, and that put a lot of pressure on them to do too much and that creates a lot of errors. I still think Nicky played really well. Leon did well in patches but he was still struggling a bit and we took full advantage of that.”

All players barring Chisholm will next take to the court at the US National Open in Boston on 6-8 December, taking up seeded positions alongside John Lumley, Steve Virgona and Josh Dodgson.

Match result:

• 6:00 pm Camden Riviere & Tim Chisholm (1) def Nick Howell & Leon Smart (2) 6/0 6/0 6/3