The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
So near yet so far as Scotland’s curlers have to settle for silver
Scotland’s Team Mouat were left to look for the silver lining after their World Men’s Curling Championship run ended with defeat by Sweden’s defending champions in a hard-fought final.
Scotland needed to take risks with time running out, allowing Niklas Edin the chance to play a welljudged double take-out and claim five shots at the ninth end, doubling his team’s tally to clinch a 10-5 win.
It was a third successive World Championship win for Edin and a fifth title overall for the Swedish skip.
Bruce Mouat, Grant Hardie, Bobby Lammie and Hammy McMillan had been the men who had ended his four-year winning streak at the European Championships on their debut in that event two seasons ago; however, this time around they had to make do with silver medals.
That was an upgrade on their previous best when they lost in the semifinals, then won their bronze medal play-off, but after a year out of international competition they could draw considerable satisfaction from having gone the distance in the event, crucially achieving their first priority of earning Winter Olympic qualification.
“There was pressure this a lot of week for multiple reasons,” Bruce Mouat said. “We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to try and get this far. We played so well to get here and I’m sure it’ll feel good in a couple of days that we’ve beaten our own record of a bronze medal.”
They had ensured that earlier in a final day that had involved a compressed schedule as a result of the postponement of matches on Saturday following an outbreak of Covid in the Calgary bubble, by beating the Russian Curling Federation 5-3 in a hardfought semi-final.
“There’s been a lot of pressure on us in terms of qualifying Great Britain a spot at the Olympics and as much as we really didn’t want to be thinking about that, it’s always in the back of our minds,” Mouat said. “We’ll look back on this as a proud moment I’m sure, but we’ve got unfinished business at the Worlds, so we’ll come back fighting.”