The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Eve Muirhead reflects on a ‘dark day’ for curling
Now that the news of the World Championships in Switzerland being cancelled has sunk in, I’m left hoping that the World Curling Federation can come up with a Plan B.
Two years in a row without the biggest annual event on our calendar would be hard to take – especially as the men are getting to play this year.
In a sport like curling, which prides itself in the fact that there’s a pretty equal split in the profile of the men’s and women’s game, that really isn’t a good look.
I know that Switzerland were desperate to host our tournament but it feels a bit selfish that they’ve left it so late before saying they can’t do it.
I always felt as if playing it at the end of the ‘Calgary bubble’, which includes the men’s Worlds, Canadian domestic events and women’s grand slam competitions, was the sensible option.
Hopefully the WCF can still make that happen.
If not, I’d like to see it put on hold until September time when, even if they don’t officially brand it as a World Championships, they can get all the top teams together to make Olympic qualification as fair as possible.
To see a big difference between men’s and women’s curling in the year before the Beijing Games really wouldn’t be good at all.
It goes without saying that we were disappointed to lose the final of the latest in-house tournament at the National Curling Academy, especially as it was going out on the BBC.
There is always a nagging doubt when you go through the round-robin stage
without dropping a game that the law of averages will catch up with you.
Congratulations to Team Aitken for the win but we know that we fell short of the standards we have set ourselves.
We’re really grateful to British Curling for providing the nearest thing to competitive curling that you can get in the circumstances we’re in but there’s no doubt that playing one team about 12 times already this season creates a dynamic that you wouldn’t normally get.
Team Aitken are a talented up and coming rink so it’s always going to
be a tight game against them.
We do always learn from what didn’t go well and the last few months have been invaluable for the relationship we’re developing with our new coach.
We’ve already moved on to the next tournament – the mixed doubles – and myself and Bobby Lammie have got high hopes that we can back up our recent British Curling League win and make it two in a row.
● I’m sure I wasn’t the only one watching the Calcutta Cup match on Saturday, waiting for the kick in the
guts to come at the end of the game. The fact that it didn’t is a huge credit to the Scotland rugby players and their coaches.
It was the sort of controlled performance we’re not renowned for.
We’re not renowned for backing up a big win either, so doing that against Wales tomorrow would be an even more important statement in my opinion than ending the Twickenham drought.
You really could start saying that this is a team to be reckoned with. Otherwise it will be the ‘same old Scotland’ chat starting up again.