Gushue faces longer road to world curling title repeat

The road to a second straight world curling championship got longer for Canada’s Brad Gushue with a 6-5 loss to Sweden’s Niklas Edin on Friday.

Gushue needs to win a quarterfinal Saturday morning to avoid elimination from medal contention and advance to the semifinals later in the day.

“We’ve got our work ahead of us,” the skip said.

With one game remaining in the preliminary round, Canada (8-3) couldn’t finish among the top two teams and get a bye to the semifinals.

Sweden and Scotland’s Bruce Mouat (10-1) earned the byes. The medal games are Sunday.

Canada will rank third regardless of the outcome against Germany (1-10) in the preliminary round’s finale Friday night.

The top six teams in pool play earn playoff berths instead of four under a new format this year.

Teams ranked third to sixth square off in quarter-finals, so Canada will face No. 6 on Saturday morning.

Norway’s Steffen Walstad (7-5) also qualified for the playoffs,

The fifth and sixth berths were still in play Friday. Switzerland’s Marc Pfister and South Korea’s ChangMin Kim (6-5), and Russia’s Alexey Timofeev and Greg Persinger of the U.S. (5-6) were jockeying for them.

Canada lost back-to-back games for the first time in the tournament after falling 6-5 to the U.S. the previous evening.

Gushue, Mark Nichols, second Brett Gallant and lead Geoff Walker from St. John’s, N.L., went undefeated to win last year’s world title in Edmonton.

Gushue beat Edin 4-2 in the final in Edmonton. Edin lost to John Shuster of the U.S. in February’s Olympic men’s final in Pyeongchang, South Korea.