Bragging rights aside, intriguing battle ahead for Team Muirhead
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 challenge today.
Their meeting with Team Smith will decide which of them finishes top of the standings and which of them avoids playing in a semi-final against the thirdplaced finishers.
However, setting bragging rights apart, the make-up of the opposition is intriguing. 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 Reid and Hamilton are meeting Team Muirhead for the first time since they departed their ranks. And then there is 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 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 No.5 ranked team.
While Reid is now playing last stones, Hamiltoniscallingtheshotswhiledelivering her shots third in the line-up.
“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,” she said. “I get good support from the other girls and I feel I 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 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 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. 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 game to record a 9-4 win over Gina Aitken’s rink and guarantee a knockout berth.