FAVES FINALLY GET TO BEAT EACH OTHER UP
Nothing but heavyweights left to battle for the Tankard in revamped Brier format
It was like going from a farmer’s bonspiel into the Canadian Olympic trials overnight.
The storyline finally went from format to form at the 89th Brier Thursday in Regina.
After five days and 14 draws of mostly lopsided games involving teams like Nunavut — including the final indignity as former famed free space on the Brier bingo card Eddie (Spuds) MacKenzie finally got to put the boots to somebody (Prince Edward Island 14, Nunavut 2) — it was “Brier on” and on to the serious stuff. Ready or not, the elite eight took the ice for two days and four games of monster matches. “At first when I got out there for the introductions and looked around at the teams that were left, I kind of thought, ‘OK. Here we go. This is where all the entertainment and the fun is really going to start,’” said Brad Jacobs of Northern Ontario, the 2013 Brier and 2014 Olympic champion who made it through the pool party with a 6-1 record. “I really can’t put into words how hungry this team is to win this thing. It’s a phenomenal feeling to win the Brier. We want nothing more to win this thing again and get our names back on the Tankard.”
Jacobs opened the championship round against Jamie Murphy of Nova Scotia, who received a standing ovation the night before in the hotel bar filled with about 40 TSN crew members who had avoided a midnight and 9 a.m. pair of tiebreaker games as a result of his win over British Columbia.
A 6-4 win over Nova Scotia to open championship play worked for Jacobs.
Team Canada skip Brad Gushue said the Brier felt entirely different Thursday.
“I saw guys and said, ‘You guys are in this event?’” he said of players from the other pool. “We literally had not seen these guys since the opening ceremonies.
“It was our first time on the ice with Saskatchewan. It was great to feel their crowd.” Gushue rolled past Winnipeg ’s Reid Carruthers 7-2 to go to 7-1 and leave the two-time Brier skip from Manitoba at 5-3 after the first championship-round draw. “I think you have to go 10-1 or 9-2 to get to the 1-2 game,” Gushue said of the Page playoff system that is the one thing that hasn’t changed with the Brier format.
“I think 8-3 would leave you pretty safely in the 3-4 playoff game.”
Twenty-four hours earlier, Team Wild Card skip Mike McEwen of Winnipeg talked about what was ahead, not expecting to suffer back-to-back losses after a 5-1 start. “Everything is really stacked at the end of it,” McEwen said. “I’ll tell you one thing: don’t get tired. It looks like a lot of curling from Thursday on. Nobody has had a back-to-back draw in five days and now you play two on Thursday and two more on Friday, all of them against the top teams in the other pool and will probably have to go the distance to win games. Then, if you hold it together, you’re in the playoff rounds. “All of a sudden we’re going to be playing teams with winning records. It’s going to be hard. It’s like being in an Olympic trials phase.”
McEwen gave up steals of two and five on consecutive ends against Alberta’s Brendan Bottcher Wednesday night to lose 9-2 and then opened championship play by sailing along in control against John Epping of Ontario (7-1 after their first championship-round match) to give up two in the ninth and a steal of two in the 10th to lose 8-7.
“All of a sudden we’re at three losses and now it looks like we’re going to have to run the table,” said McEwen when he left the ice.
“In this company, you need a few breaks,” said Epping. “You don’t generally see many skips miss draws to the fourfoot and when they do, you hope you’re the team they do it against and that’s what happened. You don’t expect Mike or any of the top skips in the world to miss a shot like that.
“We just got lucky. Pure luck.”