Skip Muirhead admits this is going to hurt for a few days
Eve Muirhead offered no excuses after yesterday’s results confirmed Scotland’s shock early exit from the World Curling Championships in Calgary.
The 2013 gold medallist and her team-mates, Lauren Gray, Jennifer Dodds and Vicky Wright, were on course for the play-offs when they won their opening three round-robin matches, but Friday night’s 9-5 loss to Denmark continued a costly run of defeats and left their qualification in doubt.
Results elsewhere knocked them out, and yesterday’s meaningless final game against Yu Han’s Chinese rink summed up their week, when a poor finish from 5-3 up allowed Han to win 7-6 at the last end.
That left Scotland eighth overall with only six wins from 13, and they will miss out on next year’s Winter Olympics unless they can come through a qualifying tournament in December.
“It’s been a really disappointing week for us,” admitted skip Muirhead.
“It’s never nice to be finished early. We need
to keep our heads up, which will be tricky, because I know this is going to hurt for a few days.
“Unfortunately we didn’t manage to finish with a win and it’s so disappointing. We just had a ropey eighth end where China managed to score three, and that really turned the game.”
The only positive note was the performance of young alternate Sophie Sinclair, who had an 84% success rate after replacing Dodds at second.
“I would like to take my hat off to Sophie and say a massive well done,” added Muirhead.
“Stepping in on the big stage and playing her first game here at the Worlds, she did very, very well out there and full respect to her. We’re really proud of how she conducted herself.”