Team Muirhead ensured British involvement in the curling at next year’s Winter Olympics when they powered into the play-offs at the end of a topsy turvy week of round robin stages at the World Curling Championships in Beijing with a brace of wins over two of their fellow contenders yesterday.
Germany, who had a matching record of five wins and four defeats going into the final day of the qualifying section of the competition and the Czech Republic, who had won four and lost five, could both have edged out the Scots with the final day comprising a tournament within a tournament as they met one another.
Eve Muirhead and team-mates Anna Sloan, Vicki Adams and Lauren Gray, who had gone into the event knowing they needed to finish well up the rankings to secure that Olympic spot, duly collectively held their nerve to over-power the Germans 7-2, setting up what was a pivotal match against the Czechs who had also kept their hopes alive by beating the Germans 5-3.
It was a tight match in which the Czechs held the upper hand with two ends remaining, but in paying tribute to the way they coped in forcing their opponents to register a single shot at the ninth before scoring two at the last to win 7-6, Glenn Howard, the Canadian four time men’s world champion who has moved into coaching with Team Muirhead was drawn into a potential entry for that old ‘Reader’s Digest’ standard ‘Towards more picturesque speech.’
“We had our backs against the wall. We knew we pretty much had to run the table in the last four games to get in the play-offs and sure enough that was the case,” said Howard.
“Had we lost the last one tonight we would probably have been in a tie-breaker which was definitely what we didn’t want to do, but what a great day. We came out blazing and probably our best game as a team was against Germany this morning and then we had a barn-burner against the Czechs.”
It was certainly a result that gave a number of teams nowhere to go in terms of this competition, the Scots claiming the fourth and last play-off spot by right, behind Rachel Homan’s unbeaten Canadians, Anna Sidorova’s Russians - who finished second despite losing to Team Muirhead in the round-robin phase - and Anna Hasselborg’s Swedes.
All of the Scots’ pre-competition targets had looked in danger of being missed when, having been surprisingly beaten by Italy on the opening weekend and another loss to the Swedes, they then suffered a double blow on Tuesday when a loss to the Koreans, whom Muirhead had previously admitted have become something of a bogey team, was followed by another to the Canadians.
That left them with a losing record at that stage with four testing matches to come, first against hosts China, then defending champions Switzerland, before yesterday’s ties.
A commanding performance against the Chinese set them up for that fast finish and Anna Sloan stepped up to make two high class shots in the ninth end to turn the match against the Swiss defending champions - who finished down in eighth place - setting up yesterday’s decisive series of matches.
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