Jacobs tops Martin in thriller match
5-4 win in 10th end sends skip directly to Olympic qualifying final
WINNIPEG It was a little like a Picasso: kind of twisted, a bit hard to figure, but beautiful in its own way.
Brad Jacobs and Kevin Martin went toe-to-toe in a battle of unbeaten curling heavyweights Thursday night at the Roar Of The Rings, and produced a minor classic.
One full of flaws and near-misses and mishaps — a hog-line foul, a moment of comedy in which Martin and his third Dave Nedohin forgot whose turn it was to throw the rock ... and oh, yes, a boatload of bombs thrown by Jacobs’ team of rising stars from Sault Ste. Marie.
It ended with another in the series: Jacobs looking at a four-foot circle full of granite with his last rock, throwing a runback double to knock the phalanx of Martin stones protecting the Ontario team’s shot rock out of play and score two in the 10th end for a dramatic 5-4 victory.
And it sent Jacobs, now 6-0, directly to Sunday’s Olympic qualifying final ... and Martin, 5-1, to Saturday’s semifinal against an opponent to be determined later.
That opponent could be John Morris’s Kelowna, B.C. team, which moved to 4-2 with a tense 7-6 win over Toronto’s John Epping, or it could be Mike McEwen, 3-3, who eliminated hometown hero Jeff Stoughton with a 9-6 decision.
And Morris plays Martin in Friday’s morning draw, and if he wins, he finishes second, ahead of the man for whom he played third on the 2010 Olympic gold medal team in Vancouver.
Other than that, there are hardly any story angles hanging on the outcomes of the next three days.
It may be too early to call it the passing of the torch — Martin, the Old Bear, isn’t done yet, and Jacobs hasn’t won his way to Sochi — but on a night when the 50-year-old Stoughton and 51-year-old Glenn Howard were pushed to the sidelines by McEwen and Calgary’s Kevin Koe, respectively, it had the look of a younger generation flexing its muscles.
None are more muscular than the Jacobs four, who look like they stepped out of an ad for Gold’s Gym, and play a big-weight, big-emotion game that is about the exact opposite of the stoic Martin and placid Nedohin.
When Jacobs’s shot banged into the pile in the four-foot and his two yellow stones remained, the fistpumps were seismic, and so was the roar from the 8,635 witnesses at MTS Centre.
“Oh, man, what a game,” said Jacobs. “In all honesty, it was pretty sloppy I think by both teams, but we hung in there, dug deep, and ... we’re just ecstatic right now. We’ve got an opportunity to go to the Olympics, and we’re thrilled.
“I said to myself in the 10th end, ‘We’ll see what we’re made of this end,’ and I’m really proud of the guys for making the shots they made coming in, and giving us a chance to throw something to win that.
“We got one more round-robin game in the morning. We know what game really matters now, but the one thing we want to do is keep some momentum — 7-0 would be great, but we know what game we have to win.”
“It was definitely an interesting game, from the first end on — with the red light (Nedohin’s hog-line foul), then they had us for four in the second but didn’t take it, then we had ‘ em, and so on and so on ... but Brad made a good one to win it,” said Martin, who blamed his own costly overthrown draw in the seventh end for changing the dynamics. He would have led by two after seven, not one.