The serene progress of the only unbeaten team at the Scottish Curling Championships has underlined their domestic domination in recent years but unbeaten Team Muirhead is set to face a slightly different type of challenge today.
Their meeting with Team Smith will decide which of them finishes top of the standings, which is not unduly significant in itself since they are already guaranteed to meet one another once again in the page play-off match that will decide which of them avoids playing in a semi-final against the third placed finishers.
However setting bragging rights apart the make-up of the opposition is intriguing because, aside from Hazel Smith, who has moved from skip to lead in the course of the season, their line-up includes two of their former team-mates, Claire Hamilton and Sarah Reid, both of whom they are meeting for the first time since they departed their ranks, as well as Kerry Barr, the only woman other than Eve Muirhead, or her third Anna Sloan, to have skipped a winning team in this competition in the past nine years.
She claimed that title in the year that Muirhead was not allowed to play, when the competition took place at the same time as she was at the Sochi Olympics, but Barr – who only joined them at the turn of the year when Laura Ritchie dropped out - was also a team-mate of Muirhead’s when she won one of her World Junior titles so is another who is unlikely to be fazed by facing the world number five ranked team.
While Reid is now playing last stones, Hamilton is calling the shots while delivering her shots third in the line-up and is enjoying the experience.
“Although Sarah has played for the last two seasons she’s got a wee bit more experience of playing last rocks than me, so we’ve tried it a few different ways and this is what we’re doing now,” she said.
“I get good support from the other girls and I feel have a fair bit of experience to be able to call a game.”
Having had a year or so out during which she tried cycling competitively, there was always going to be an experimental element to her return this season.
“I didn’t know what to expect,” she said.
“I think it’s going better this week than might have been expected because we’ve not had much success this season really. We’ve been close but not really managed to qualify in a lot of the tournaments because we’ve been working on things all the time but we’re improving and this week we knew what we were still wanting to work on, but it’s going pretty all right so far.”
While they have won five of their six matches so far she knows that the real challenge begins today.
“It’s still a really long way to go here,” Hamilton observed.
“We’ve still got the favourites, Team Muirhead, to play tomorrow morning so that’s obviously going to be a really tough one.
“I don’t think it changes anything. It’s just four curlers against four curlers, which is how I try to approach every game, but it’s going to be a really tough one.
“It’ll be different playing against them but I’m just hoping to have a good game.”
Team Fleming, who had been seen as the likelier line-up to challenge Muirhead having shown considerable improvement this season, showed that they, too, could yet make an impact when, having put themselves under pressure with three defeats ahead of their final round-robin match yesterday, they upped their performance level to record a convincing 9-4 win over Gina Aitken’s rink and guarantee themselves involvement in the knockout stages.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here